To be fair, some parts of The Trees are not comic. The underlying message of the book is that we should remember those who were killed by white supremacy. That we should remember that the history of lynching is American history, and that it represents a massacre spread out over years. This book is an act of remembering.
About two thirds of the way in there is a chapter that goes on for several pages and consists almost entirely of a list of names. Early on, I found myself wondering, Were these actual people? They can't be. They must be. Emmet Till's name shows up on the 7th page, but even then I wasn't really sure. The first name I recognized after that was Matthew Shepard, and I can't even say that's when I was sure. It was on the page after that where suddenly there were so many names I recognized, starting with Ramarley Graham. I assume the list is chronological or approximately so, but even in the last couple pages there will still many names I'd never heard. It's powerful. (Incredibly, I didn't notice until after finishing the book that this list of names is right there on the cover.)
Of course the list brought me back to two books I've talked about together before: 2666 with its list of murdered women in Mexico and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ with its list of martyrs. I felt sure I had seen this done somewhere else more recently, but I'm not sure where. Perhaps I'm thinking of EEG, which I described when I read it as "a catalogue of under-reported atrocities," and which, like The Trees, is very much a command to remember.
To return to the comic part of the novel: maybe we need humor in the face of trauma. This book certainly offers it. There is a dark comedy to the whole story, but there are also individual lines that are laugh-out-loud funny. (Maybe you had to be there, but the appearance for one page of a "Detective Wesley Snipes, no relation and White" had me screaming laughing. He could have had any name. He's never mentioned again.) To quote Lynn Steger Strong, the judge who selected The Trees as the winner in the first round of the 2022 Tournament of Books, "There’s so much sad and shitty in the world; so many books are so earnestly enmeshed in their own certainty and self-seriousness. The winner is The Trees, because in addition to all its many other accomplishments, it also made me laugh."
