Review: Lawrence Jackson on Percival Everett

Jul 28, 2023

Veteran, manic, and quirky, Percival Everett over the last three decades seems to have become comfortable with his identity as the indefatigable black satirist of our age. The key conceit of Everett’s recent novel Dr. No, whose plot only vaguely plays on the 1962 James Bond film, is a mildly pedantic double entendre on the words “nothing matters.” It might not be the most original book, but it is funny. Ralph Townsend, the autistic hero of the book, who also calls himself Wala Kitu (Tagalog and Swahili for “Nothing Nothing”), is a mathematician at Brown University, appearing here, it is implied, as a relative backwater in the universe of the Ivy League, a signature note of irony for Everett. Kitu has a one-legged dog who interprets his dreams and an aspirational girlfriend/damsel-in-distress named Eigen Vector whose social greeting is confined to stating whether or not her shoes match.

This duo’s escapade, spiced with game references to GRE-grade mathematics problems, springs from Kitu’s insouciant mathematical investigations, which have landed him a big prize, the identification of the universe’s eternal wellspring: weighty, rich nothing; not anti-matter, not negation, not absence, but the meaty thing itself, zilch. The villain of the story is John Sill, the descendent of a Memphis, Tennessee, Black Power couple sacrificed by the malevolent state but enriched along the way. Though Sill’s heart darkens as the novel unfolds, he has a genuine axe to grind, and arrives to recruit Kitu with the aim of harnessing the big nothing as his weapon. As Sill leans into his role as supervillain, in an act of collective punishment he erases Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was once called nigger, and threatens to go wider with his animus. “He wants to make America nothing again.”

The caper trucks along for a while with Kitu as the endearing, morally righteous, befuddledly brilliant, tireless investigator. There is lot of showering, naps, lunch, and snacks; the author displays mastery of the repertoire of the stay-at-home dad. Culture-camp characters who make an appearance include Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent #66 from Get Smart, and Schultz “I know nothing!” from Hogan’s Heroes. The reader discerns that Kitu is offered as the archetype of a value system some people believe to be in abundance: one without prejudicial judgement, shorn of revanchist envy, and delighted by pure reason, citizen of a world without ideology, a world of human essence, minus excrescence. Everett tests the reader’s allegiance to this high code by doubling back on the genre conventions, the sentimental plots and plot fictions, and the shopworn characters. What seem to open up as stereotype guffaws is remixed, though perhaps in a mechanical sort of way. The kindly black servant, Leon Coltrane, doling out ham-filled biscuits, resurfaces as an agent of the Bundesnachtrichtendienst—secret police of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The novel’s implicit promise of thoughtful entertainment is perhaps ironicized to the point of imperceptibility, but Everett does seem to have the handle on the joke of blackness in the face of white supremacy. As a black person who has as a formative experience a lengthy, humiliating, and near-lethal encounter with the New Jersey State Police in 1986, I found this bit of Kitu’s road journey laugh-out-loud hilarious. Everett describes the oblivious thirty-six-year-old hero being stopped by the police while driving down the highway in New Jersey. Unconscious of how he looks to others or the history of the situation, the hero doesn’t have a driver’s license or even really know how to drive.

“Why did you pull me over?”

“You’re Black.”

“That’s it? Because I’m Black?”

“That’s usually enough.” He looked south down the highway.

“Your driving was a little erratic.”

“That’s because I learned to drive three days ago.”

“What?”

“The woman I bought the car from took me to a mall parking lot and gave me a basic lesson.”

He stared at me and walked away, on his radio again. “Base, I have to report that this guy doesn’t even know how to drive.”

“Eighteen, you have your orders.”

“Problem?” I asked.

He turned back to me. “No. Go on, I guess. They told me to let you go. So go. Go before I shoot you.”

Everett is reliably positioned by contemporary critical culture as the genius underrated writer who refuses compromise with the market, trusts his own precocious sense of humor, finds fond companionship with esoteric academic theory, and departs from ordinary custom in regard to American racial mores; a sparsely populated niche shared mainly by, perhaps, Charles Johnson. The implied payoff is some sure-footed values lurking within it all to guide us through the minefield of day-to-day life. Dr. No’s candidate for a guide, virginal (literally) Wala Kitu, is not driven by a desire for a pleasure like genital stimulation or a false plateau like happiness, of which he asks, “Is it something I can take on, something that I can occupy, or is it something that occupies me? Is it something I find or something that I passively catch?” At the moment of brass tacks he gravitates toward the those he identifies as “human and complete with feelings.” But Dr. No’s best evocation of any reliable guiding principle is a moment of evolved innocence: “Eigen was frightened, but not more than I was. We held hands. That was new; however, it did feel strange or foreign.” (This reader misses a “not” in this sentence, but perhaps that is just Everett.) The hero of abstraction, “nerdy and Aspergery and awkward and brilliant,” is cheekily insightful when it comes to propositions of honesty (with one exception), but the plot of Dr. No assures us that at its mountainous, galactic conclusion, nothing does really, really matter.

Lawrence Jackson is the author of Shelter: A Black Tale from Homeland, Baltimore and biographies of Chester B. Himes and Ralph Ellison as well as other works of nonfiction. He is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University, where he directs the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts.

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