The Trees by Percival Everett
Published 2022 · 320 pages · 80,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Mystery & Crime
How hard is The Trees to read?
The Trees scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Everett writes in terse, sardonic prose that captures Southern speech patterns and police procedural vocabulary. The language is accessible but precise, with dark humor emerging from understatement and deadpan delivery.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Sentences are often clipped and controlled, building through accumulation of absurdist detail. Everett's prose has the rhythm of someone delivering impossible facts with deliberate calm.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- The novel explores racial violence, American history, and the possibility of justice through a series of murders across the country where each crime scene includes a body resembling Emmett Till. The surreal premise becomes a way to confront what never gets resolved.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- The history of lynching, the Emmett Till murder, and the textures of small-town Mississippi layer through the narrative. Everett builds his portrait through accumulated attention to crime scenes, town politics, and the weight of unacknowledged history.
- Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
- The detectives' investigation reveals pieces of a national pattern while the impossible facts resist explanation. The reader must track what can and cannot be explained while understanding what the surreal elements express about reality.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The recurring body becomes symbolic of the history that won't stay buried. Money, Mississippi becomes symbolic of crimes never prosecuted. The trees become symbolic of lynching's legacy across American soil.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Everett maintains substantial ironic distance through deadpan delivery of impossible events. The novel is darkly comic about American denial while deadly serious about what's being denied.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- The investigation reaches its conclusion; the larger phenomenon continues. Everett offers partial answers while the national reckoning remains unfinished.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- The procedural format provides accessible structure while the surreal elements complicate interpretation. The form is engaging, with genre elements making the confrontation with history palatable.
How The Trees is regarded
The Trees holds a literary regard score of 62 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.