Dr. No

Starred review from October 3, 2022
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.

Starred review from November 1, 2022

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

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Starred review from September 15, 2022
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.

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Starred review from October 1, 2022
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.

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