The Trees

ISBN: 164445064X

Год издания: 2021

Язык: Английский

Paperback, 309 pages

CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN, BOOKFORUM

"The Trees is a wild book: a gory pulp revenge fantasy and a detective narrative that alternates between deadpan and slapstick modes of satire. It has all the right beats for the big screen, except that it's too profane and obscene to be greenlit in Hollywood, even for the likes of Quentin Tarantino. His retribution epics offer an obvious point of comparison: The Trees is just as blood-soaked and just as hilarious as Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained, but it comes with more authentic historical weight for being set in a dreamlike counterpresent rather than a cartoonishly counterfactual past ... For all the absurdism, there is of course a serious strand to The Trees an elegiac strain enters the novel ... It's tempting to call The Trees the ultimate novel of the Trump era. It is the rare book that sees the forty-fifth president less as a menace here than a nuisance, the Republicans as so many falling elderly dominoes, and their white-supremacist voters a decrepit network of armed bozos. In that way, it's also tempting to read The Trees as a hopeful book, but such a reading might also be naive."