After really liking Everett's Erasure, this was a great disappointment. It certainly has its clever parts, but in this case they really aren't put to use for any serious purpose. A mathematician, who is an expert nothing, is employed by a billionaire supervillain to rob nothing from Fort Knox. That sentence makes about as much sense as many of the sentences in the book, which I almost stopped reading early on. It gets a bit better, but then.... The book is a pastiche of Bond villain stories, but the narrative isn't at all compelling. Instead, it's just one scene after another (tedious) scene and it never really gets anywhere. Perhaps Everett was trying to achieve an effect sort of like Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle? Probably not, but the editor or publisher should have sent this one back for some rework before foisting it on the public. ( )

Wala Kitu is a professor of nothing, “I work very hard and wish I could say I that have nothing to show for it.” He becomes involved in a plot to steal nothing from Fort Knox. “There was a credible faction of the military complex that believed as I did that nothing was the solution to everything.”

Wala is recruited into this plot by a billionaire who has turned himself into an evil Bond villain, complete with secret compounds, a submarine, a small army and robotic henchmen - and henchwomen. His evil goal is to “make America nothing again.”

Aside from the numerous subversive plays on nothing the plot is that of a typical Bond film. The characters are elevated from the norm and quirky in a way that I think only Percival Everett can make them. There’s his usual mix of unintelligible philosophy and science and physics and math and somehow it all becomes another brilliant novel. ( )

“Infinity means nothing to me. How could it? Nothing is neither finite nor infinite. Nothing is neither a null set nor a member of that set that contains all things that are not something. Things are matter, some things matter, nothing is never matter, nothing matters.”

Percival Everett’s Dr. No revolves around thirty–five–year–old Wala Kitu, a distinguished professor of mathematics at Brown University whose area of expertise is “nothing”. The name Wala Kitu (both first and last name) also means nothing. He is essentially a loner, brilliant, perceptive, and logical, on the spectrum, never having learned to drive nor ever even kissed a woman ( as the narrative progresses he does manage to do both, sort of!) with his one-legged bulldog Trigo as his constant companion (with whom he converses in his dreams). His research and in-depth knowledge of “nothing” attracts the attention of a wealthy aspiring supervillain (with a complete origin story and evil persona cultivated from watching James Bond movies), John Milton Bradley Sill who pays 3 million dollars for Wala Kitu’s expert consult. Wala’s colleague/friend/ fellow mathematician Eigen Vector succumbs to the charms of our supervillain and is subsequently drugged and manipulated to participate in Sill’s plans. As the narrative progresses, our protagonist begins to understand how dangerous Sill truly is and the devastation his plans will cause. Sill’s nefarious plans involve breaking into Fort Knox to steal the stock of nothing and using a weapon called a “complex projective plane orbiter” to wreak havoc and exact revenge against the United States for events from his past. What follows is a series of events involving submarine rides, helicopters, corrupt people in power, henchmen, secret identities, a vampy pilot, secret lairs and shark pits and a whole lot of villainy and Wala’s heroic plans to save the day.

Though the plot is not similar to the James Bond film of the same name, Percival Everett's Dr. No is a cleverly written (the wordplay on “nothing” is mind-boggling!), entertaining parody of the James Bond series with sci-fi and socio-political elements interspersed throughout the narrative (some subtly and some not so much). A laugh-out-loud funny, bordering on absurd yet thought-provoking read that is much more than a whole lot of “nothing”, Dr. No is a wild ride that might not appeal to everyone, but those who enjoy satire and wordplay, not to mention James Bond references, would enjoy! The Trees was the first Percival Everett novel I’d read and thoroughly enjoyed. With Dr. No, the author does not disappoint.

I paired my reading with the incredible audio narration by Amir Abdullah, which truly elevated my experience with the novel.

Audio Narration: 5/5
Story : 4/5 ( )

It was clever, it was amusing, but nothing happened. ( )

This book is basically one clever little joke that gets stretched way too far. The narrator is an autistic math professor whose career is devoted to the study of nothing. He is contacted out of the blue by a wannabe supervillian who wants nothing so that he can use it to destroy the world. He is convinced that Fort Knox contains nothing, and wants the narrator's help stealing it. It's a funny gag, but the joke gets old pretty fast when it's stretched into a full-length book. The book ends up being a satire of Bond-style thrillers. ( )