DR. NO

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.