Perhaps Percival Everett’s The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, made readers realise what an astonishing writer he is. But there is certainly a great backlist. I am particularly fond of Erasure, Glyph, I Am Not Sidney Poitier and American Desert in his satirical vein; and Suder, Walk Me to the Distance and Wounded in his more elegiac and contemplative tone. Dr. No seems to be in his Menippean form, until you realise just how seriously he is joking. I have often thought that a joke is not funny until it stops being funny, when it becomes hilarious, and this novel exemplifies that.
The central character is not actually called Wala Kitu, two words from Tagalog and Swahili that both mean nothing. He is a professor of mathematics, whose speciality is the idea of nothing, though, as he would be quick to point out, even an idea of nothing is not nothing. He is dreamy, and speaks to his one-legged dog in his dreams (yes, you read that correctly), discussing whether the nothing he has in his hand is bigger than the nothing in the dog’s single paw. The gag runs from the start: what do you work on? Nothing. What interests you? Nothing. What do you care about? Nothing. It might seem like Thomas Bernhard or Edward Albee until it goes madcap.
Wala Kitu is approached by John Sill, who offers him ludicrous sums of money because he very much wants nothing. Specifically, he wants to be a Bond villain and to weaponise nothing. Kitu goes along with this, since nothing really matters. The caper is beautifully choreographed, and has a number of little winks to the Fleming oeuvre – a character called Auric, for example; tanks that might or might not be full of sharks; and a plot to invade Fort Knox. Everett is astute on character names, and I often found myself looking up the significance of the nomenclature. Sometimes it can resemble a crossword clue, as when I realised that Vice-President Shilling is a hidden snark on Pence.
Everett has always managed to combine the best of postmodernism with a genuine love of pulp fiction. It is done elegantly here, and the divagations on the philosophical and mathematical notion of nothingness do not detract from the harum-scarum, hi-jinks plot. All of which would mean less than nothing except for the way in which Wala is depicted as a lonely individual and Sill as a righteously aggrieved one.
The point of the gag is a slow reveal. Towards the end of the book it is made explicit: ‘Our country has never given anything to us and it never will. We have given everything to it. I think it’s time we gave nothing back.’ Or, as Kitu reflects prior to this, after the beta-testing:
Because though nothing had happened there, nothing had happened there and what was left was nothing. More than 90,000 people were up to nothing, had gone to nothing, had been affected by nothing and were left with nothing and there was nothing to do or say.
To annihilate, to obliviate, to erase is a political wound.
It is a delicate balance to put together the zany and the profound. It is rare to read a book which is so smartly satirical and yet finds the space to quote Derrida – the final section being called ‘Il n’y pas de hors-texte’. You have to be vastly intelligent and desperately modest to know that you know nothing.
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