'Dr. No' is a delightfully escapist romp and an incisive sendup of espionage fiction
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Loading... - Luna Rojas
- 10 Mar 2023
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Pulitzer and Booker Prize finalist Percival Everett won another prestigious award this month, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, for his newest book, Dr. No. Taking a sharp turn with his first novel since the triumphant success of The Trees, Everett's Dr. No is 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. First, both of its main characters are men of color, eschewing the determined whiteness at the center of most spy novels, and putting race in play in challenging and shockingly entertaining ways. Since no one is more insightful or fearless on the subject than Everett, this choice pays off brilliantly. To induce laughter in a protagonist's racially driven traffic stop in this age is nothing short of a literary miracle.
Second he gives us a MacGuffin that literally has no value. The hero of the story, Wala Kitu, is a brown-skinned, Brown University mathematics professor specializing in the study of "nothing," who gets swept up in a strangely high stakes yet pointless government heist spearheaded by an egomaniac with millions of dollars to burn. This self-styled "self-made" billionaire (let the record show, he inherited tens of millions from his mother) has a singular goal: "John Milton Bradley Sill aspired to be a Bond villain, the fictitious nature of James Bond notwithstanding." And so in what becomes sort of an "emperor's new clothes" kind of situation, he pays Wala handsomely for his expertise in "nothing." Read More..
