Just what you need--a book about nothing. I think the whole thing was a set up for the last line. As always, Everett writes like a tightrope walker. As a reader you're constantly wondering where/if ( )

The blurb refers to this as "puckish", so I'll go with that, although "silly" would probably serve as well. The rickety premise here is that a plutocrat engages the services of a mathematician who is the world's greatest expert on nothing to advise him on his quest to become a Bond villain, which said mathematician takes on with the help of his talking dog. The book is frequently amusing, but is driven by punning on the concept of nothing, which to me got a tad old, and frequent dorm room style speculations on cosmology and number theory, often with the dog, sometimes with the aspiring villain, and sometimes with another mathematician and a robot who eventually show up. The author is keen to show off his knowledge of this-n-that, especially equations, but also topics such as physiology. One doesn't really need to understand the math to follow the action and enjoy the humor, but I found the know-it-allism a trifle offputting. ( )

[b:Dr. No|59808430|Dr. No|Percival Everett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1641779994l/59808430._SX50_.jpg|94199906] is a droll black comedy, rather like [b:The 7th Function of Language|35610817|The 7th Function of Language|Laurent Binet|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1515115679l/35610817._SY75_.jpg|71033745] in tone but narrower in focus. The protagonist is a mathematician whose area of expertise is nothing. The whole book struck me as largely a pretext for wordplay involving nothing, which it does very well. A random example:

"And why are we having this conversation?" I asked.
"For the sake of negation."
"You mean it all means nothing," I said.
"Nothing."
The sun pounded down on us and a bunch of dreamlike things danced about, the world asserted its form, its dreaminess. But I expected as much from my dreams. My dreams, like the world, being made up, as it were, of unexpressed facts, unuttered observations, unformalised logical statements, remained pure and true and yet without meaning, until nullified by utterance. Isn't anything sacred? Nothing. Nothing is sacred.

I suspect that repetition would have exhausted this bit had I not read the entire book in one sitting. As it was, I found the hapless protagonist's picaresque adventures with a billionaire entertaining. Everett satirises the super-rich and America's racist police wittily. I enjoyed Trigo the one legged dog, but found the female characters a bit dispiriting. The constant drugging of Eigen and Gloria turning out to be a robot didn't really hit the mark for me. The dialogue is very snappy and makes the absurd plot flow smoothly. The ending was inevitable and could not possibly have been otherwise. 'Nothing happened.' [b:Dr. No|59808430|Dr. No|Percival Everett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1641779994l/59808430._SX50_.jpg|94199906] is a well-executed novel about nothing, although I'm not sure there's much more to it than that. ( )

This book has the same kind of slapstick humor that "The Trees" had...an almost Pynchonian mixture of silliness and erudition that is both comforting and challenging. "Dr. No" is sort of an absurd parody of a Bond plot. Where anything can happen like talking dogs and nothing can happen, which in fact, does. ( )

After really liking Everett's Erasure, this was a great disappointment. It certainly has its clever parts, but in this case they really aren't put to use for any serious purpose. A mathematician, who is an expert nothing, is employed by a billionaire supervillain to rob nothing from Fort Knox. That sentence makes about as much sense as many of the sentences in the book, which I almost stopped reading early on. It gets a bit better, but then.... The book is a pastiche of Bond villain stories, but the narrative isn't at all compelling. Instead, it's just one scene after another (tedious) scene and it never really gets anywhere. Perhaps Everett was trying to achieve an effect sort of like Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle? Probably not, but the editor or publisher should have sent this one back for some rework before foisting it on the public. ( )