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.
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.
Dr No by Percival Everett is published by Influx Press (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
