Percival Everett has serious fun playing with your expectations

It somehow seems that Percival Everett, one of the most inimitable and distinct voices in contemporary American fiction, who has been a finalist for some of the world’s most prestigious literary prizes, is still largely unknown to mainstream readers. It’s impossible to resist reading that fact into the symbolism of the publicity photo on the back of his latest novel, “Dr. No” — an empty park bench. “It’s ‘Dr. No,’ it’s all about nothing,” he explained recently, with a shrug, during a video interview.

The novel is an antic caper about a mathematician, Wala Kitu, whose name translates to Nothing Nothing and who studies the concept of nothing. But there’s more to the image of that bench than absence. It’s a sight gag, a provocation, an invitation to see something differently. (Why on earth do writers put their photos on books?) Reading the works of Everett is an invitation to see everything differently.

I spoke with Everett on Zoom, where his backdrop was an office cluttered with books, string instruments and a prominently placed atlas of the state of Wyoming. Bearing in mind my own meager output - three books published over 16 years — I asked him immediately how he had been able to publish 33 over 30 years, including novels, poetry and short-fiction collections. “I don’t stress about anything,” he said. He admits to occasional worries about the well-being of his family — his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and the couple’s two teenage sons — but he does not sweat writing. “I mean it’s just books,” he said.

Part of what he means is the opposite of how that sounds — that it’s only the books he cares about, rather than, say, fame and especially fortune. “Some people just want to make money writing,” he said. “I think they’re insane.”

Everett, who’s been a professor of creative writing at the University of Southern California since 1998, does not tour or maintain a presence on social media. He is grateful to his longtime publisher, Graywolf, for sharing his priorities. “Nobody there talks to me about marketing because my eyes glaze over,” he said. He does not read reviews. While Everett’s long career, which began with “Suder,” in 1983, makes him the consummate writer, people who often interact with authors will recognize that these kinds of pronouncements also make him the anti-writer.

If his dramatic lack of careerism is singular, so too is the motivation behind his work. “I’m interested in ideas, and I try to find vehicles for them,” he explained. He once said, “I would love to write a book everyone hated.”

In this he has not been successful. “Dr. No” follows “Telephone” (2020), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and “The Trees” (2021), a gruesome, funny and profound murder mystery about lynching in the United States that was shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. While not a bestseller in his home country, Everett has a loyal global readership and is beloved in France in particular. There is a Percival Everett International Society.