Dr. No

Literary fiction · Absurdism · Parody · Satire

Print length: 272 pagesInflux Press, 2023

Description

Wala Kitu is a mathematics professor whose specialty is nothing—not merely an absence, but a subject he approaches with scholarly seriousness. His research attracts billionaire John Sill, who recruits him for an impossible operation: stealing a reserve of nothing from Fort Knox and using it to reduce the United States to nothing. Behind Sill’s wordplay lies a campaign of revenge rooted in his father’s murder after witnessing the state-sanctioned assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Kitu is drawn into a spy plot where philosophical paradox, racial history, and national power become parts of the same dangerous joke. Percival Everett uses the machinery of a James Bond adventure to ask what “nothing” means in a country that has systematically withheld opportunity, justice, and value from Black Americans.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Direct · Experimental · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Absurdist · Cerebral · Irreverent · Satirical

Structure

Linear

Focus

Ideas · Plot · Voice

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

JusticeKnowledge and truthPolitics and ideologyPowerRace and racismRevenge

About Percival L. Everett

Percival L. Everett is an American novelist whose work ranges across satire, philosophical fiction, westerns, mysteries, and thrillers. These forms often become mechanisms for examining race, identity, language, and institutional power. His prose tends to be direct and sharply comic, while his structures accommodate parody, interruption, and experiments with voice. In Erasure, the career of a formally ambitious Black novelist is intercut with the grotesque parody he writes, making the publishing industry’s appetite for stereotype part of the novel’s design. James returns to the story of Huck Finn through Jim, whose outward performance of ignorance is set against his private intelligence and determination to write his own account. Its adventure pacing carries continual calculations about speech, danger, and survival. Dr. No pushes Everett’s method toward absurdist spy fiction, building a plot around a mathematician who studies nothing and a billionaire’s impossible scheme. Everett repeatedly borrows familiar narrative machinery, then uses wordplay, irony, and self-conscious storytelling to expose its assumptions.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Influx Press
Language: English
ISBN: 9781914391248

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.