What’s the Difference Between a Bond Villain and a Billionaire?
Beluga caviar. Fennel flowers. Beer-poached lobster. Not exactly a boxed lunch, but this is not your typical work meeting. John Sill, a Black billionaire with a maniacal desire to be a Bond villain, has gathered his appropriately eclectic cast of accomplices. One is a general, the commanding officer at Fort Knox. Another is a professor of mathematics who studies the nature of zero, or “nothing.” The latter is feeling a bit in over his head; he is starting to think maybe he wants, well, nothing to do with any of this.
By this point in —the latest zany masterpiece from the novelist Percival Everett—there have been all we would expect from a spy novel: pointless submarine chases, private flights to secret compounds in the Mediterranean, and sexually available women, including one with a comically literal name. Yet Sill’s work, as the general has been explaining to Wala Kitu, the professor, is not just a game.
