In a New Novel, Percival Everett Riffs Gleefully on 007
|
In a New Novel, Percival Everett Riffs Gleefully on 007
“Dr. No,” which borrows its name from an early James Bond story, features a math professor who’s recruited by a supervillain.
By Molly Young
Nov. 1, 2022
DR. NO, by Percival Everett
Was there superior technology in the 1960s for removing the smell of cigarettes from clothing or did James Bond’s tuxedo permanently reek? In rewatching “Dr. No,” the first Bond film, I couldn’t reconcile all that photogenic smoke with my strong intuition that Sean Connery always smelled fantastic.
The rewatch was prompted by Percival Everett’s new novel, which borrows a name and a genre from the spy movie. Everett’s version of the title character is a distinguished professor of mathematics at Brown University who studies nothing, meaning that he contemplates and researches the topic of nothingness. His name is Wala Kitu, but he has a doctorate and specializes in naught, so: Call him Dr. No, if you please.
A self-made billionaire named John Sill hires Professor Kitu to aid in his quixotic ambition to turn himself into a Bond villain. “You know, evil for evil’s sake,” the billionaire explains in a coffee shop shortly before sliding a $3 million check across the table.
Like every villain, Sill has an origin story. This one involves the murder of his father and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. As vengeance, Sill resolves to destroy America using a weapon called a “complex projective plane orbiter.” What does that mean? Don’t worry about it. Why does he need Kitu’s help? Because Kitu knows more about nothing than anyone else, and the weapon is fueled by — or maybe produces, or both — nothing, which is apparently very dangerous. Separately, Sill plans to burgle Fort Knox, which he believes to be filled with a similarly dangerous quantity of nothing.
In other words, Sill intends to instrumentalize “nothing” for mass destruction. But to instrumentalize is to objectify — as soon as “nothing” is used, it will become “something” — and so Sill’s attempts may be doomed from the start. This paragraph demonstrates a mischievous trick perpetrated by Percival Everett, which is that it is hard to write or even think about his work without sounding like an inferior edition of Percival Everett.
Everett is a formidably prolific author — the “Also by Percival Everett” list at the front of the book takes up an entire page — and impossible to capture in a log line. Even if you concentrate only on the novels, leaving aside the poetry and stories, you will be thwarted in every attempt to generalize. Everett writes parody and horror and magical realism; he has produced an epistolary novel and a novel that was published in three variations but with the same cover.
The closest I can get to a thesis is to venture that all of these novels evoke the sensation of spotting a forest from afar and then discovering, upon closer inspection, that each tree is a different species. (Not helpful.) What’s clear is that Everett returns to certain themes: academia, language games, boxes containing secrets, Blackness and nonsense. “Dr. No” hits all of them.
Wala Kitu attended Princeton before puberty. He is “on the spectrum” and remains innocent of a woman’s touch until age 35, when he is forcibly smooched and finds the experience “rather like kissing a colander.”
When Kitu realizes that John Sill’s fanciful plans might lead to actual destruction, he finds himself playing the role of Bond — a character who has definitely not kissed a colander. Bond is insatiably horny (more so in the early films) and even a little kinky. There’s a scene in “Dr. No” where Bond grabs a used towel from a freshly showered lady and furtively puts it in his mouth. As with avid sun-tanning and smoking, towel eating has disappeared from the behavior portfolio of today’s movie heroes.
A second difference between the two protagonists: Bond is cool. It would be inaccurate to describe Kitu as “not cool” for the same reason it would be inaccurate to describe a chinchilla as “not sexist.” The concept doesn’t apply. He is, however, calm and collected. When John Sill manipulates the professor into jetting to Miami for evildoing purposes, Kitu’s first instinct is to ask whether the man’s lair contains a library.
In addition to the lair there is a submarine, a helipad, a shark pool and a stealthy manservant. There are foxy ladies in skintight bodysuits, goons, cuff links. Of course there are henchmen.
Kitu’s skills include thinking quietly and asking perceptive questions. Moving through his benefactor’s absurd world of private jets and robots, he is Lewis Carroll and Alice combined. The cornball innuendo of the Bond universe (“You always were a cunning linguist, James”) would bounce from Kitu’s literal mind like a tennis ball from a freshly surfaced court, which means that the vamp of the story, Gloria, cannot speak in triple entendre but must issue questions such as “Do you want to have sex?” which Kitu inevitably turns down, violating rule No. 1 of Bondian masculinity: Desire is always desirable.
One way to evaluate an artist is to observe the quantity and quality of misinterpretation his work begets. By this measure Everett ranks very highly. “Damn it, I don’t understand it, but I love it,” mutters one of the characters, regarding Sill’s weapon of nothingness. Same. Kitu has a colleague named Eigen Vector, which refers to … something having to do with linear transformations? If anyone wants to explain the term eigenvector to me as if I’m 5 years old, feel free.
There’s a moment when John Sill gazes at the “Mona Lisa,” which he has stolen from the Louvre. The painting, he villainsplains to Kitu, is artistically unimpressive but nevertheless “a work of genius. Marketing genius.” The producers of the next Bond movie should pay Everett a handsome sum to replace the character’s customary introduction with this phrase. Picture it. The suave spy, played by a clone of Sean Connery — because this is my fantasy and you’re just living in it — gently sets down a shaken martini and offers his hand to whatever seductress is on tap. “I’m a work of genius,” he tells her. “Marketing genius.”
DR. NO | By Percival Everett | 262 pp. | Graywolf Press | Paperback, $16
Molly Young is a book critic for The Times, a contributing writer to The Times Magazine and the author of the newsletter Read Like the Wind. She was previously the book critic for New York magazine.
|
Replies are disabled on threads older than 7 days.
|
|