“He thought I was being dismissive and walked away. Later, he recalls that when a colleague once asked him why he knows so much, he replied “because nothing matters”. Early on, Kitu tells us his name means “nothing nothing” in Tagalog and Swahili, before saying it’s all “bullshit”.
Together with his astrophysicist colleague, Eigen Vector, in “skin-tight black jumpsuit and black leather high-top sneakers”, Kitu zips around on Sill’s private jet, roaming superbaddy strongholds in Corsica and Kentucky, never sure whether he is Sill’s accomplice, captive or foe – a productive ambiguity that’s also a symptom of the narrative’s hectic self-cancelling. Our narrator is Wala Kitu, an American mathematician whose specialist subject, “nothing” – the source of too many gags to count – attracts John Sill, a scheming billionaire and would-be Bond villain intent on wiping Washington DC off the map, an endeavour that gets a trial run when he repurposes a space satellite to obliterate a Massachusetts town where “a lot of White racists live”.Ī getaway narrative ensues when government heavies storm Kitu’s house. If The Trees owed a debt to the detective novels of Chester Himes, this is a dizzying shaggy dog story written under the spell of another of Everett’s guiding lights, Thomas Pynchon, with maths, weapons of mass destruction and mix-ups between pie and pi and CNN and the CIA, as well as starring roles for a backstabbing vice-president named Shilling, someone called Bill Clinton (“not that Bill Clinton”) and the priest from The Exorcist. That it should be Dr No, a honeycomb-light chase caper, is the kind of deflationary plot twist that probably tickles him to the marrow.
So for the first time in his 40-year career, Everett has a UK readership anticipating his next book.
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