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Summary
Summary
WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD
A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising
The protagonist of Percival Everett's puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means "nothing" in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for "nothing.") He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. Once he controls nothing he'll proceed with a dastardly plan to turn a Massachusetts town into nothing. Or so he thinks.
With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. In the process, Wala Kitu learns that Sill's desire to become a literal Bond villain originated in some real all-American villainy related to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. As Sill says, "Professor, think of it this way. This country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it's time we gave nothing back."
Dr. No is a caper with teeth, a wildly mischievous novel from one of our most inventive, provocative, and productive writers. That it is about nothing isn't to say that it's not about anything. In fact, it's about villains. Bond villains. And that's not nothing.
Genre:
| Thrillers (Fiction) |
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The immensely enjoyable latest from Booker-shortlisted Everett (The Trees) sends up spy movie tropes while commenting on racism in the U.S. The narrator is Wala Kitu, a Black mathematics professor researching the substance of "nothing," which yields endless clever riffs (in his search for nothing, he has "nothing to show for it"). Kitu is recruited by John Sill, a Black billionaire and aspiring supervillain hoping to use the power of "nothing" to terrify the nation, all in retaliation for the murder of his parents by a white police chief. Intrigued by the possibilities of furthering his research, Kitu joins Sill and is whisked to a Miami lair to begin plotting the attack on Fort Knox, which Sill claims contains no gold, just a powerful "nothing." Along for the ride is Kitu's sheltered white colleague, topologist Eigen Vector, whom Sill drugs into becoming his arm candy. As Kitu learns more about Sill's plan and witnesses his ruthlessness, he tries to escape and save Eigen. Another Sill associate, Gloria, a Black woman with an "enormous afro" who also seems to be under Sill's spell, tells Kitu her brother was shot for "standing around being Black." Throughout, Everett boldly makes a farce out of real-world nightmares, and the rapid-fire pacing leaves readers little time to blink. Satire doesn't get much sharper or funnier than this. (Nov.)
Guardian Review
Percival Everett, who made his debut in 1983, was little known to UK readers before his 2001 satire Erasure, the intimate tale of an African-American writer's existential crisis, framed by a ruthless send-up of the racist publishing industry helping to fuel it. But after that success, Everett's output - restless as well as prolific, riffing on literary theory, Greek tragedy, westerns - largely escaped British attention. Almost none of his books were in print here before he caught the eye of the small independent press Influx, publisher of last year's The Trees, a knockabout cop romp that unearthed the history of lynching via a zombie-tinged revenge scenario involving grisly murders of white people in Trump-era Mississippi. Played for laughs yet deadly serious, it made the Booker shortlist and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, a mark of its transgressive genius. It features maths, weapons of mass destruction and mix-ups between pie and pi So for the first time in his 40-year career, Everett has a UK readership anticipating his next book. That it should be Dr No, a honeycomb-light chase caper, is the kind of deflationary plot twist that probably tickles him to the marrow. If The Trees owed a debt to the detective novels of Chester Himes, this is a dizzying shaggy dog story written under the spell of another of Everett's guiding lights, Thomas Pynchon, with maths, weapons of mass destruction and mix-ups between pie and pi and CNN and the CIA, as well as starring roles for a backstabbing vice-president named Shilling, someone called Bill Clinton ("not that Bill Clinton") and the priest from The Exorcist. Our narrator is Wala Kitu, an American mathematician whose specialist subject, "nothing" - the source of too many gags to count - attracts John Sill, a scheming billionaire and would-be Bond villain intent on wiping Washington DC off the map, an endeavour that gets a trial run when he repurposes a space satellite to obliterate a Massachusetts town where "a lot of White racists live". A getaway narrative ensues when government heavies storm Kitu's house. Together with his astrophysicist colleague, Eigen Vector, in "skin-tight black jumpsuit and black leather high-top sneakers", Kitu zips around on Sill's private jet, roaming superbaddy strongholds in Corsica and Kentucky, never sure whether he is Sill's accomplice, captive or foe - a productive ambiguity that's also a symptom of the narrative's hectic self-cancelling. Early on, Kitu tells us his name means "nothing nothing" in Tagalog and Swahili, before saying it's all "bullshit". Later, he recalls that when a colleague once asked him why he knows so much, he replied "because nothing matters". "He thought I was being dismissive and walked away. Nothing matters." (Geddit?) Much fun is had with the paradox of how "nothing" is always something, not to mention the difference between "begging" a question and "raising" one, as well as any amount of mathematical jargon, but it tends to be the kind of fun that likes to remind you just how much fun you're having. Still, Everett is far too shrewd to let his conceit entirely speed away over the hills. Sill's villainy, we learn, stems from his need to avenge the police murder of his parents, who knew too much about their conspiracy to assassinate Martin Luther King - prior events revealed in almost audaciously desultory fashion during one of Kitu's early bouts of banter with his one-legged bulldog, Trigo, a strategically zany outlet for backstory. There's an interesting counterpoint here to AM Homes's recent novel The Unfolding, which likewise turns on a crazed scheme to correct the course of American history. But anyone coming straight to the antic energy of this novel after reading The Trees might miss the earlier book's expert manipulation of mood, its blindsiding moments of sobriety and a sense of laughter that mattered. At the climax of Dr No, someone wonders if Kitu has a getaway plan, "not that a plan is the best thing to have always". "You're saying I should give them nothing?" Kitu asks. "As much of it as you can get," comes the reply. Everett knows exactly what he's doing, and I doubt he'd be entirely displeased at the notion that Dr No amounts in the end to a whole lot of nothing.
Kirkus Review
A deadpan spoof of international thrillers, complete with a megalomaniacal supervillain, a killer robot, a damsel in distress, and math problems. One never knows what to expect from Everett, whose prolific fictional output over the last four decades includes Westerns (God's Country, 1994), crime novels (Assumption, 2011), variations on Greek mythology (Frenzy, 1997), and inquiries into African American identity (I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 2009). This time, Everett brings his mordant wit, philosophic inclinations, and narrative mischief to the suspense genre, going so far as to appropriate the title of an Ian Fleming thriller. Its nonplussed hero/narrator is a mathematics professor at Brown University who calls himself Wala Kitu. It turns out he's the grown-up version of Ralph Townsend, the genius child in Everett's novel Glyph (1999), who retains everything while determined to say nothing. Indeed, "nothing" is the recurring theme (or joke) of Everett's latest, beginning with its title and continuing with the meaning of both Wala (nothing in Tagalog) and Kitu (nothing in Swahili). "Nothing" also appears to be the major objective of one John Milton Bradley Sill, a "slightly racially ambiguous" self-made billionaire who declares to Wala his ambition to be a Bond villain, "the sort of perpetrator of evil deeds that might cause the prime minister to dispatch a double-naught spy." John Sill offers Wala a hefty sum ($3 million) to help him rob Fort Knox just as the eponymous baddie of Fleming's Goldfinger tried to do. Wala's not sure whether Sill's joking or not. But the money's big enough to compel him to tag along as Sill goes through the motions of being a supervillain, stopping along the way in places like Miami, Corsica, Washington, D.C., and, eventually, Kentucky. Wala's accompanied throughout by his faithful one-legged bulldog, Trigo, and a math department colleague named Eigen, who at times seems to be literally under Sill's spell but is almost as vexed by the nefarious goings-on as Wala. Being stalked throughout by Gloria, a comely, deadly Black android with an on-again, off-again Afro, doesn't ease their anxieties. Everett is adroit at ramping up the tension while sustaining his narrator's droll patter and injecting well-timed ontological discourses on...well…nothing. It may not sound like anything much, so to speak. But then, neither did all those episodes of Seinfeld that insisted they were about nothing. And this, too, is just as funny, if in a far different, more metaphysical manner. A good place to begin finding out why Everett has such a devoted cult. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Seinfeld is all about it, and King Lear warned against it, but mathematics professor Wala Kitu, whose name means "nothing," is the world's foremost expert on it, which, as scientific achievements go, is really quite something. Unfortunately, Kitu's work draws the attention of John Milton Bradley Sills, billionaire and aspiring "modernist" James-Bond villain, whose goal appears to be cornering the market on nothing for, let's call it singular reasons. Wala is drawn deeper and deeper into Sills' fiendish plot, accompanied by his trustworthy (and apparently psychic) one-legged dog, Trigo, and astrophysicist and fellow math genius Eigen Vector (yes, another math reference) as they globe-circle by submarine, encounter ineffectually stoic secret agents, survive shootouts and shark tanks, all with nothing at stake. Math jokes abound ("How is the pie?" "Calculated to 50 places") yet are not overly obtrusive, and the numerous echoes of spy capers and Bond-like quips ("'Villain' is such an elastic, shall we say limber, term") lull both Wala and the reader into comforting complacency just before someone's guts get ripped out. -Hurston/Wright Legacy Award--winner Everett (The Trees, 2021) continues to be an endlessly inventive, genre-devouring creator of thoughtful, tender, provocative, and absolutely unpredictable literary wonders.
Library Journal Review
While Everett's recent Booker-nominated The Trees cut its mystery and horror with a dose of dark humor, his latest is an unabashedly wonky romp, with things up to a wonderfully deadpan 11. The novel follows Wala Kitu, a mathematics professor who is an expert on nothing--that is, the tangible existence of "nothing," which means it is something--as he is roped into a nefarious plot orchestrated by would-be Bond villain John Sills, who wants to rob Fort Knox--not of gold but of a shoe box full of nothing that he would use, vindictively, to make the racist United States into…nothing. Are you following? The result feels situated somewhere on the continuum between a punchline and the answer to a riddle, a droll "Rube Goldberg"--ian caper in the vein of Charles Yu's How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe; imagine Jerry Lewis wandering into a spy thriller. But this bit of wittily supercharged comedy is carried out with full conviction and craft from Everett, delivering hilarious dialogs that continuously pinwheel around elliptical metaphysical theory and a who's-on-first brand of linguistic playfulness. VERDICT A go-for-broke work of literary comedy that successfully blends rib-tickling eccentricity with affecting and stealthily moving discourse on race, wealth, and the failures of neoliberal institutions; you're unlikely to read anything funnier this year.--Luke Gorham