Here in all its glory is the entirety of Chapter 71 of Percival Everett's The Trees:
Ho to Hind: "What the hell is going on?"
Everett, Perceval. The Trees. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2021. ch. 71, p. 213.
While this is the shortest chapter in the book, it is not much of an outlier. Chapters 15 (p. 44), 55 (p. 158), and 91 (p. 267) are also under a page each. There might be others of equal brevity.
The novel's 308 pages encompass 108 chapters, making the average chapter less than three pages long. The longest, Chapter 64, is ten pages (pp. 185–194), and consists almost entirely of a list of names. Its being the longest is thematically apt. But why are the other chapters so short? What is gained by breaking up the narrative into such compact chunks? It is not necessarily the case that these tiny chapters carry a lot of weight. If Chapter 71 had been left out altogether, for example, it would not have impeded the narrative at all. So, what is the structural and thematic design behind keeping the chapters so brief? What narratological purpose does this choice serve? Has Everett commented on this aspect of the novel? Have reviewers, critics, or scholars had anything to say on the subject?
