Everett returns to certain themes: academia, language games, boxes containing secrets, Blackness and nonsense. Dr. No hits all of them ... 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.
... the latest zany masterpiece from the novelist Percival Everett ... our revenge seeker would seem to be both misguided and insincere. Over time, he degrades his sympathetic origin story by treating it as little more than plot filler, trauma that needs to be there to set up the kinds of melodramatic one-liners that we expect from our movie villains ... Over time, his motivations come to seem as hollow and empty as his weapon of choice ... No one understands the slippery nature of identity like a spy, and Everett relishes the devices of the spy thriller, wielding Bond tropes as if they were flame-throwing bagpipes or cigarettes laced with cyanide ... This is the fantasy of Black capitalism, and in Dr. No, Everett has given us an antagonist up to the task of representing its delusions—a villain who thinks he is a hero, a savior who shows up empty-handed.
... what about supervillains? Maybe it's something about this uncertain era, populated by peculiar billionaires obsessed with outer space, irresponsible demagogues with cultlike followings, and yacht-bound oligarchs that make a character like Lex Luthor feel more realistic than a character like Superman ... A prolific novelist and finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the Booker Prize, Percival Everett plays with that possibility to dizzyingly good effect ... In the villainous character of John Milton Bradley Sill, Everett gives us a charmingly witty, possibly insane billionaire with a decades-long grudge to bear against the United States and an elaborate plan for revenge that hinges on the application of a deeply esoteric field of mathematics ... a breezy, strange, frequently hilarious, action-adventure story that's rife with Everett's talent for deadpan dialogue and vivid scene-setting, but just as equally given to brainy tangents and wordy digressions on dense mathematical concepts ... It's also another thoughtful entry in Everett's career-long literary exploration of America's troubled racial legacy. But he keeps the mood light by mimicking the silliest conventions of spy movies, with a story that shifts between exotic locales and luxury compounds, and a large cast of characters chasing around in planes, a submarine and a yacht, heavily armed jeeps and sports cars. Kitu makes for a delightfully eccentric protagonist, a maladjusted math whiz with a one-legged dog, Trigo, who talks to him in dreams ... might be a little too odd, a bit too brainy and inclined to philosophic-mathematic ruminations to significantly build on any new fans Everett gained with his last few, lauded novels. Still, fans of last year's The Trees will see parallels — the earlier book a detective thriller with suggestions of the supernatural, Dr. No a spy caper that shades into science fiction, both propelled by reckonings over racial injustice ... What marks Everett as a singular talent is the way he elevates such serious concerns inside a stylishly executed, frequently hilarious pair of genre thrillers. By the end of Dr. No, even as the self-negating logic of Everett's plot about nothing builds to an inevitably surreal conclusion, a more pertinent question than what's happening (or not happening) on the page might be, what are the actual chances that an unhinged billionaire with limitless resources and a righteous sense of grievance could bring widespread harm upon society? Probably not nothing.
A delightfully escapist romp as well as an incisive sendup of espionage fiction. Everett makes a myriad of compelling creative choices in crafting this satire, but a few crucial choices really elevate the game ... I found the style of storytelling the book's most interesting trait. In contrast with the gravitas and dark gallows humor of Everett's previous novel The Trees, Dr. No has a light touch ... In combination these elements add up to a master class in satirical style.
Most of Dr. No is a goofy anti-thriller that revolves around Sill’s evil schemes and Wala’s halting efforts to thwart them. Yes, there are gorgeous robots, a devastating space laser, a pool of man-eating sharks under the dining room and lots of diabolical chuckling. But needless to say, Wala is no Sean Connery. He knows nothing. He’s never touched a woman. And forget the Sunbeam Alpine Series II. Wala doesn’t even know how to drive. All of which Everett exploits to parody both the Bond films and the bizarro world of physics and mathematics in the outer limits of reality ... This is all amusing. But having recently read “The Trees,” which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, I wish that Dr. No zeroed in on America’s racial environment with the same comic intensity. Defanged by its own silliness, this new novel merely hints and feints. The racially motivated murders that sparked Sill’s revenge fantasy quickly feel irrelevant ... risks feeling flip, almost like nothing. The result is a story unlikely to leave you shaken or stirred.
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 ... Gleefully subverted ... One of Everett’s many gifts as a novelist is his ability to balance his wild comic sensibilities with an unmistakable seriousness of purpose ... Everett’s commitment is absolute ... It’s all a great deal of fun, and Everett gets a lot of comic mileage out of his narrator’s affectless reactions to the increasingly absurd situations he finds himself in ... With its relentless philosophical jokiness and its joyfully involuted narrative, Dr No feels lighter and brisker than much of this lavishly prolific and talented writer’s other work. But even when he seems to be writing about nothing, Everett is always up to something interesting.
A honeycomb-light chase caper ... A dizzying shaggy dog story ... Everett knows exactly what he’s doing, and I doubt he’d be entirely displeased at the notion that Dr. No amounts in the end to a whole lot of nothing.
Everett’s Dr. No uses wide-angle farce to refract the fantasy of the first 007 movie... through the lens of a contemporary, race-savvy viewer. It is not exactly a critique of Bond fantasies; it’s more a refunneling of them to illustrate the challenge of getting to first principles ... Dr. No not only uncharnels fantasies; it also twists the genres of those fictions and dresses them in a healthy dose of hokum, before pitching itself to us with renewed velocity.
[A] wickedly clever conceit ... That’s the sort of twisted logic that readers find throughout Dr. No, along with clever references and character names ... The result is a memorable work that has fun with spy-novel tropes while also addressing the treatment of Black people in America. Dr. No takes a while to get going, but there’s plenty of classic Everett sophistication to delight his fans ... Brilliant.
Math jokes abound...yet are not overly obtrusive, and the numerous echoes of spy capers and Bond-like quips...lull both Wala and the reader into comforting complacency just before someone’s guts get ripped out. Hurston/Wright Legacy Award–winner Everett continues to be an endlessly inventive, genre-devouring creator of thoughtful, tender, provocative, and absolutely unpredictable literary wonders.
Everett conducts a highwire act in Dr. No, balancing opaque mathematical theory with disarmingly deadpan humor over a daunting crevasse of nothing ... Riddled with irresistible wordplay, as again and again characters express their fascination with and desire for nothing. Likewise, Everett's referential treatment of his characters borders on the uncanny ... The result is an entertaining caper of philosophical proportions. It is an adventure that can be appreciated on any of the numerous levels that Everett is working on, from the unassuming bumbling of a humble mathematician to the provocative consequences of unmitigated power, nothing is quite as enjoyable as Dr. No.
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 ... 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.
A deadpan spoof ... Everett is adroit at ramping up the tension while sustaining his narrator’s droll patter and injecting well-timed ontological discourses on...well…nothing. It may not sound like anything much, so to speak. But then, neither did all those episodes of Seinfeld that insisted they were about nothing. And this, too, is just as funny, if in a far different, more metaphysical manner ... A good place to begin finding out why Everett has such a devoted cult.
Immensely enjoyable ... Throughout, Everett boldly makes a farce out of real-world nightmares, and the rapid-fire pacing leaves readers little time to blink. Satire doesn’t get much sharper or funnier than this.
