Percival Everett has been called a “seriously playful” writer, and his penchant for dark humor places him squarely in the tradition of idiosyncratic fiction writers like Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and even such acerbic, seemingly anomalous influences as Herman Melville and Chester Himes.  

It’s plausible that the 65-year-old Everett’s productivity and range exceed theirs despite his relative stature as a cult author. His 27 novels and story collections vary wildly in topic and genre. His 1994 Western spoof, God’s Country, was followed in 1996 by Watershed,a more straightforward contemporary Western. He has also written boldly inventive variations on Greek mythology such as 1987’s For Her Dark Skin,a fresh spin on Medea’s tale, and 1997’s Frenzy, about the transformative experiences of Dionysus’ assistant, Vlepo. He has also challenged hidebound racial attitudes in such works as 2001’s Erasure, about the pigeonholing of African American writers, 2009’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier, whose title character is really (and pointedly) named “Not Sidney Poitier” and last year’s The Trees, longlisted for the Booker Prize, which uses the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till as a springboard to a burlesque modern-day mystery/comedy.

His latest novel, Dr. No (Graywolf, Nov. 1), is prototypical Everett in its droll wit, thematic irreverence, and philosophical tomfoolery. It cheekily borrows both a title and a plotline from Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel to expound on the concept of nothing, or negation, one that Everett has engaged in many novels and stories. In a starred review, Kirkus calls it a “good place to begin finding out why Everett has such a devoted cult.

Interviewed by phone from Los Angeles, where he’s taught English literature and writing for decades at the University of Southern California, Everett says he’d never read the Fleming novels but thought more about the six decades of James Bond movies they inspired in fashioning his pastiche.

“I have some affection for the Bond movies,” he says, in wry, measured tones evoking his deadpan style on the page. “But it’s limited somewhat by their vacuity. And I think it’s the vacuity that I wanted to deal with, essentially, this middle-aged guy acting out these fantasies of sex and global adventure. They may as well be Woody Allen [comedies]. But I wasn’t trying to play off any Bond story so much as the consciousness behind the movies.”

Everett also takes the unusual (for him) step of making his narrator/protagonist a lead character from one of his previous novels. Ralph Townsend, the mute genius child from Everett’s 1999 novel, Glyph, is herea grown-up mathematics professor at Brown University who now calls himself Wala Kitu, both words meaning nothing in Tagalog and Swahili, respectively. Ralph/Wala, who according to his creator is still “on the spectrum,” is being paid a hefty sum by a multimillionaire and aspiring supervillain named John Milton Bradley Sill to help him rob Fort Knox as Bond antagonist Auric Goldfinger once tried to do.

Everett’s nonplussed hero, who couldn’t be less Bondian in both nature and tactics, seems haphazardly borne from place to place (Washington, D.C., Corsica, Miami, and eventually Kentucky) and from peril to peril, one of which includes a homicidal, sex-starved Black android named Gloria whose wardrobe and hairstyle are constantly changing.

Everett’s facility with plotting, here and elsewhere, is one of his underrated traits. Nevertheless, he concedes, “I’m no good at making it up as I go along. But I think anybody who does any kind of exploring with a plot…well, a map is merely an excuse to get lost. And you can change your mind at any point, especially if there’s a river that pops up somewhere that wasn’t there before.”

Basically, he says, “I’m open to what serves the story. There are always reasons for writing which are private and, you know, philosophical. I’m always trying to serve that. And I don’t always know the best way to serve it until I get into it.”

How, he is asked, did the concept of nothing enter this novel, or any of the other novels, including Glyph, where the idea is probed?

“I don’t know. If I did, I probably wouldn’t write novels about it,” he says. “I love puzzles.…I like things that are difficult to understand. I like things that I don’t understand. I still try to understand, in some way, string theory. I read about it all the time and I can’t tell you one thing about it.”

One suspects that unraveling a Percival Everett narrative, whether in short or long form, is what makes them fun for his readers, especially those who enjoy the process of unraveling for its own sake. Dr. No is a blackout-comedy maze of red herrings, misleading assertions, and self-deceptions. Though neither Everett nor his protagonist say so explicitly, the commensurate folly of both the novel’s situations and the characters’ actions appears to reflect or represent society’s fumbling efforts to compensate for its fear of nothing or nothingness.  

Everett has only a glancing familiarity with Seinfeld, everybody’s favorite sitcom about nothing. But he insists that his own take on nothing isvery different from that iconic TV show.

“It’s more about vacuity than nothing,” Everett says of Seinfeld. “Nothing is something. Vacuity is the absence of substance.”

Got it?

Gene Seymour has written for the Nation, the Washington Post, and CNN.com.