“I recall that I am extremely forgetful,” announces the narrator of Percival Everett’s Dr No in the novel’s opening lines. “I believe I am. I think I know that I am forgetful. Though I remember having forgotten, I cannot recall what it was that I forgot or what forgetting feels like.” No sooner has the reader crossed the threshold of the narrative than it begins to reveal itself as a labyrinth of mirrors, an elaborate and joyously rickety construction of philosophical gags and structural paradoxes. The novel, Everett’s 23rd, follows last year’s Booker shortlisting of 2021’s The Trees and is a kind of metaphysical caper. The narrator, Wala Kitu, is a professor of mathematics at Brown University, whose area of expertise is nothing. Which is to say that his entire academic career has been devoted to the study and explication of complete absence. Even his name means nothing: Wala is Tagalog for “nothing”, while Kitu is Swahili for the same thing – or non-thing. (His real name, he reveals early on, is Ralph Townsend – an admission that will lead readers familiar with Everett’s earlier work to recognise the now thirtysomething mathematician as the ingenious polymathic toddler at the centre of the 1999 post-structuralist satire Glyph.)
It’s hard to think of any American fiction writer since Thomas Pynchon who is as committed to excavating a novel’s themes through cerebral jokes. Everett derives near-infinite eggheaded wordplay from the linguistic absurdity of nothing as a subject. “I just received a grant that I hope leads to nothing,” Kitu tells a fellow professor at one point; elsewhere, contemplating his failure, despite years of study, to capture the white whale of nothingness, he says: “I work very hard and wish I could say that I have nothing to show for it.”
