[Dr. No is] sharp-witted satire about racism, violence and academia – and it proves why Everett is one of the most unpredictable and original novelists working today.”—Michael Schaub, NPR.org, Best Books of 2022
“The preeminent satirist delivers a deadpan hilarious send up of poisonous contemporary racism and the international espionage genre. . . . It’s absurd and utterly brilliant.”—Oprah Daily, “Best Books of Fall”
“If the unexpected always happens in Everett’s individual novels, the variety across the work also astonishes.” —Asali Solomon, The Washington Post
“It is hard to write or even think about his work without sounding like an inferior edition of Percival Everett. . . . One way to evaluate an artist is to observe the quantity and quality of misinterpretation his work begets. By this measure Everett ranks very highly. 'Damn it, I don’t understand it, but I love it,' mutters one of the characters, regarding Sill’s weapon of nothingness. Same.”—Molly Young, New York Times Book Review
“The latest zany masterpiece from the novelist Percival Everett. . . . This is the fantasy of Black capitalism, and in Dr. No, Everett has given us an antagonist up to the task of representing its delusions—a villain who thinks he is a hero, a savior who shows up empty-handed.”—Jennifer Wilson, The Atlantic
“The phenomenally talented and prolific Percival Everett conducts a highwire act in Dr. No, balancing opaque mathematical theory with disarmingly deadpan humor over a daunting crevasse of nothing. . . . The result is an entertaining caper of philosophical proportions. It is an adventure that can be appreciated on any of the numerous levels that Everett is working on, from the unassuming bumbling of a humble mathematician to the provocative consequences of unmitigated power, nothing is quite as enjoyable as Dr. No.”—Dave Wheeler, Shelf Awareness
“Everett is a true American genius, a master artist. . . . As off-kilter as ever, Dr. No is Percival Everett at his most artfully absurd and ironic, and it might be just the thing to finally propel this star into the literary ether.”—Carole V. Bell, Oprah Daily
“Everett continues to be an endlessly inventive, genre-devouring creator of thoughtful, tender, provocative, and absolutely unpredictable literary wonders.”—Booklist, starred review
“Everett brings his mordant wit, philosophic inclinations, and narrative mischief to the suspense genre. . . . [He] 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.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A delightfully escapist romp as well as an incisive sendup of espionage fiction. . . . [A] master class in satirical style.”—Carole V. Bell, NPR.org
“Percival Everett has always been a prolific writer, but the past few years have been an epic run even for him. . . . This caper novel will keep you laughing and pondering; nothing will get in the way of that.”—Omari Weekes, Vulture's Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2022
“It’s hard . . . to imagine a novelist today with fresher eyes than Percival Everett.”—Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
★ 11/01/2022
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
★ 2022-08-31
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.
