DR. NO by Percival Everett

from her home in San Francisco and shows up at her grandmother’s new condo at a glitzy retirement center. A loving familial gesture—except that in this case, the older woman’s distress is the result of a really bad date, when the man she’s with dies in the middle of their first sexual interlude. This sets the tone for the novel as a whole: It’s the story of three women bound by deep love and very few boundaries. While Bindu’s sexual drama does drive a chunk of the plot, the three deal with a whole host of problems, supporting each other with advice, chai, and lavish home-cooked meals. Tech-genius Cullie needs to develop a new state-of-the-art app while opening herself up to the possibility of love. Recent divorcée Aly is trying to prove her worth at work while dealing with a surprise visit from Ashish, her ex-husband (and Bindu’s son). And Bindu is balancing her desire to be liberated in her golden years with traumatic memories that she cannot shut out. Told from the alternating perspectives of Cullie, Aly, and Bindu, the novel often relies on overly coincidental plot points and too-convenient characters. That said, these problems are offset by Dev’s success at portraying the profound bonds of care, humor, and love that run among the three women: “Love so strong it was almost painful tightened around Bindu’s heart for these two. The world would never see them like this, entirely comfortable in their skin. This was a world they had created, the three of them, because of who they were.”

Everett, Percival Graywolf (232 pp.) $16.00 paper | Nov. 1, 2022 978-1-64445-208-0

A deadpan spoof of international thrillers, complete with a megalomaniacal supervillain, a killer robot, a damsel in distress, and math problems. One never knows what to expect from Everett, whose prolific fictional output over the last four decades includes Westerns (God’s Country, 1994), crime novels (Assumption, 2011), variations on Greek mythology (Frenzy, 1997), and inquiries into African American identity (I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 2009). This time, Everett brings his mordant wit, philosophic inclinations, and narrative mischief to the suspense genre, going so far as to appropriate the title of an Ian Fleming thriller. Its nonplussed hero/narrator is a mathematics professor at Brown University who calls himself Wala Kitu. It turns out he’s the grown-up version of Ralph Townsend, the genius child in Everett’s novel Glyph (1999), who retains everything while determined to say nothing. Indeed, “nothing” is the recurring theme (or joke) of Everett’s latest, beginning with its title and continuing with the meaning of both Wala (nothing in Tagalog) and Kitu (nothing in Swahili). “Nothing” also appears to be the major objective of one John Milton Bradley Sill, a “slightly racially ambiguous” self-made billionaire who declares to Wala his ambition to be a Bond villain, “the sort of perpetrator of evil deeds that might cause the prime minister to dispatch a doublenaught spy.” John Sill offers Wala a hefty sum ($3 million) to help him rob Fort Knox just as the eponymous baddie of Fleming’s Goldfinger tried to do. Wala’s not sure whether Sill’s joking or not. But the money’s big enough to compel him to tag along as Sill goes through the motions of being a supervillain, stopping along the way in places like Miami, Corsica, Washington, D.C., and, eventually, Kentucky. Wala’s accompanied throughout by his faithful one-legged bulldog, Trigo, and a math department colleague named Eigen, who at times seems to be literally under Sill’s spell but is almost as vexed by the nefarious goings-on as Wala. Being stalked throughout by Gloria, a comely, deadly Black android with an on-again, off-again Afro, doesn’t ease their anxieties. Everett is adroit at ramping up the tension while sustaining his narrator’s droll patter and injecting well-timed ontological discourses on...well…nothing. It may not sound like anything much, so to speak. But then, neither did all those episodes of Seinfeld that insisted they were about nothing. And this, too, is just as funny, if in a far different, more metaphysical manner.

BY MARK ATHITAKIS

Basso Cannarsa-Agence Opale

Yiyun Li’s fifth novel, The Book of Goose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 20), turns on the peculiar friendship between two preteen French farm girls shortly after World War II. Fabienne is precocious and creative, with an affinity for the transgressive and macabre. Agnès is more reserved but eager to follow along. Fabienne dictates a series of stories to Agnès that becomes a literary sensation; Agnès, the public face of the duo, is wrongly hailed as a prodigy and sent to a British private school to perfect a craft she doesn’t possess.

Li, who’s received a MacArthur Fellowship among many other literary honors, was inspired to write Goose by an Elizabeth Bowen review of ’50s-era books by four French child prodigies, one of whom was a sham genius much like Agnès. But the drama in the novel is mostly interior, in keeping with Li’s deeply contemplative, precise, and often melancholy writing.

Speaking by video chat from her home in Princeton, New Jersey (she teaches at Princeton University), Li discussed the motivations behind The Book of Goose, the popular groupreads of classics she led during the pandemic, and the virtues of slow reading. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. One of the key lines in this book is, “Nothing is more inexplicable than friendship and childhood.” What interests you about childhood friendship as a subject? I find it so fascinating. When two children meet each other, very rarely do they smile at each other. They just look at each other and bypass the small-talk stage to get to the essence of things. I see you. Do I know you? Do I want to know you? I was thinking about how childhood friendship is formed and how it’s so instrumental to who we become.

Those friendships can be mysterious. Agnès and Fabienne invent their own way to relate with each other, wholly apart from adult norms. Yes, and I think when I was younger that was probably more prominent. With the internet, there’s a circulated language and kids are less isolated. In the ’70s and ’80s, when I was a child, consciousness was entirely wrapped around who we were talking to day to day, who your best friend was. Friendship during that developmental stage often provides the circumstance for our entire being, language, and consciousness.

This story was inspired in part by the story of a young French girl who became a literary celebrity before being exposed as a fraud. What did you want to explore in that incident? I thought it was an interesting little hoax. I’m sure it happens these days, but they get forgotten. When the narrative is not so neat, people just throw it away and move on to the next prodigy. But I wasn’t really interested in the prodigy per se. I wanted to write about a pair of friends and how, together, they outsmarted the world, at least for a period of time. And also how they formed each other.

Did you have any models for writing about friendship in this way? Elena Ferrante would be an obvious recent example. It’s so funny: After I turned in the manuscript, everybody mentioned Elena Ferrante, but she did not cross my mind. At all. I

didn’t even think about it. Ferrante’s books are about a decadeslong friendship, and I was more interested in that period between ages 12 and 14, just on the cusp of becoming grown-ups but still children. There’s something very pure and a little bit nasty about that age. It’s a very complicated thing. The closest example I can think of in fiction about girls that age would be [Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel] The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

It struck me that this might be a very different book if it were written from Fabienne’s perspective. Oh, I would never have let Fabienne write this book.

Why? She has a lot of opinions and ideas and thoughts and feelings about the world, and I’m more interested in how those things are reflected by Agnès’ consciousness. Fabienne is a sharper, brighter character. She’s sort of like a diamond, sharp and clear. I like the muddiness, those smudges in the characters.

How do you feel this book fits with your other work? People will say, “This is not about China, this is not about Asian Americans.” But I think it’s consistent with the kind of characters and subject matter I pay attention to: loneliness and the very complicated and inexplicable interior landscapes of people. From the outside, this book might look a little different. But from where I’m looking, it’s just another book by me.

You were working on this book during the pandemic. Did that change your process? The pandemic can be claustrophobic: You’re just there with your own characters. But in a funny way it was a very good thing. I was just immersed with these characters. They were as real to me, probably more real to me, than the rest of the world.

Since the pandemic started, you’ve led online book clubs for War and Peace and Moby-Dick that drew large followings. Did that experience change how you think about your work or your relationship with readers? I realized that there’s something very special about reading slowly, just a small segment a day. I hate when someone says, “I devoured that book.” No. You have to savor it. You have to decant the book. You have to let it breathe. I’m always patient, but I’ve become much more patient. I’m astronomically patient at this point.

Do you have another group-read planned? In November we’re going to read Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). I love that novel. It doesn’t get as much attention as Jane Eyre, but it’s very contemporary. Jane Eyre could only happen in that house, in that setting. With Villette, I feel like you can see its main character, Lucy Snowe, walking down the street in any city at this moment.

Earlier this year you received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Do you have a new collection coming? Maybe five years ago, I had an entire collection ready to go, and then it just happened that I was bringing out other books instead. But I think next fall there’s going to be a collection of stories. My last one, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, was published in 2010, so it’s been a little while. I probably have more stories than I can fit into one collection now. I may have to do some rearranging.

What are you teaching at Princeton? I teach fiction writing. One thing I learned about my students is if you give them a book to read, the day before a deadline, they can read very fast. Apparently in an hour they can read 100 pages [laughs]. So last year, and I’m going to do this again, I used a very good book for slow reading: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. You cannot rush through that book in one sitting. I assigned them just one chapter a week. They have to spend seven days reading 10 pages and annotate those 10 pages. When you ask them to slow down, they’re reading words. They’re reading sentences, images. They’re reading their own thoughts. If you read too fast, that never happens. When I collected all my students’ annotations, I thought, “This is the best criticism ever written about Housekeeping.”

Mark Athitakis is a journalist in Phoenix who writes about books for Kirkus, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. The Book of Goose received a starred review in the July 1, 2022, issue.