Postmodernism meets pulp fiction: Dr. No, by Percival Everett, reviewed

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.