Hijinks ensue, marked by 1960s-era Bond signifiers: a woman’s naked feet, a female pilot with an Afro, a speedy elevator, a submarine. She’s named Eigen Vector, for the complex linear algebraic concept, and she might be on the spectrum, as is Kitu. In a further wrinkle, Kitu falls for a female colleague who has become Sill’s girlfriend. Kitu agrees to help, but shady agents-one named Bill Clinton-from a top-secret government agency show up to thicken the plot.
The premise suggests a kind of inverted version of Goldfinger-an allusion heightened by the shared use of the name Auric. If it is full of nothing, then how will I move it? How does one transport such a thing? Does it need to be refrigerated at minus 273 degrees Celsius?” “When I open the vault,” he asks, “and I will, how will I know that nothing is there? It’s a big vault. Because he likes to surround himself with people smarter than he is, he cajoles Kitu into an ongoing consultation. Such revenge is, in some sense, empty, but also deadly serious: Sill means to stand against a white supremacist society. In a prison scene that echoes the 1997 confrontation of Ray by King’s son Dexter-the family has said they believe Ray was part of a conspiracy-Sill questions the fictional shooter about his father’s murder. A white chief of police killed his mother. His father was killed by a fictionalized version of James Earl Ray, who was convicted of assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. He became a villain, after all, not for villainy’s sake but rather for revenge. Sill’s ambition is to break past the legendary gold-guardian security and steal a shoebox of nothing from Fort Knox.
He’s a Black mathematics professor, a later-day version of the kidnapped genius-baby who narrates Everett’s 1999 novel, Glyph.īecause of his mathematical expertise in “nothing,” Kitu is engaged by the billionaire John Milton Bradley Sill, a self-styled Bond wannabe.
Yet as he’s wont to do, Everett quickly upends these assumptions when he reveals that the narrator’s real name is Ralph Townsend. The name, then, appears to be “nothing-nothing”-a mock double zero, or negative of a negative. “Wala” means “nothing” in Tagalog, and “Kitu” also means “nothing,” but in Swahili. The narrator tells us that his name is Wala Kitu. No announces itself as a highly referential screwball comedy straightaway. A parody of 007 movies, Percival Everett’s novel Dr.
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