The first time I came across Telephone, Percival Everett’s 20th novel, was in early March 2020. As fiction reviews editor of Publishers Weekly, I was still going into the office each day to wade through the galleys on my shelves and edit the reviews in the magazine’s bullpen, where I’d somehow learned to tune out my colleagues’ chatter, a skill I’ve long lost to the solitude of the pandemic.
At the time, with the world as we knew it about to shutter, neither our reviewer nor I knew that Everett’s book was being produced in three versions, each with variations, including different endings. Nor could we be certain a couple of months later, when the novel was released along with the news of Everett’s unconventional approach, whether each of our two copies had been the same. When the finished books came to stores, the three varying editions were marked by one of three readings of illustrated compasses on the cover. We still didn’t know, though, whether the same rule had applied to the galleys. Since this was before publishers sent every book as a PDF, there was no quick way to compare notes.
I had yet to read Telephone, and though I was already a big fan of Everett’s, hearing about the experiment gave me a greater appreciation of his writing. A simple way to conceptualize the three versions of Telephone would be that each leads the reader to one of three distinct interpretations. But Everett is not a writer of message-driven books. It’s more interesting, then, to think of Telephone as one book with negligible variations, their effect no greater than a different trim size or paper stock. I also prefer to think of Telephone’s three iterations as an elaborate joke about how we all read a book differently. Just like at the end of a game of telephone, when the last player announces the distorted version of what was originally said, after it’s been relayed through multiple people, and everybody bursts out laughing.
Jokes run rampant in Everett’s work, and Telephone is no exception. Though the story and style are more somber than in Everett’s most recent and more kinetic Dr. No, there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, especially on the very last page—at least the one that I read. Unlike in Dr. No, however, where the subject of nothing is milked mainly for humor, in Telephone, it’s a source of pathos.
The hero of Dr. No, Wala Kitu, has less in common with James Bond than the average archaeologist does with Indiana Jones. He’s not even a spy. He’s a math professor at Brown University who studies the concept of nothing, who’s never had sex, and who doesn’t know how to drive. But every supervillain needs a Bond, and John Milton Bradley Sill, a billionaire who, like Wala, is Black, picks Wala to teach him about nothing, hoping he can harness nothing’s power and take revenge on America for its legacy of racism.
The protagonist of Telephone, Zach Wells, is also a professor; his fields are geology and paleobiology, and his own nothing is a cavity in a wall of the Grand Canyon called Naught’s Cave—Zach imagines that the man who found the place meant “naught as in nothing,” “Nothing Cave.” Zach’s marriage, too, is hollow. He and his wife, Meg, a poet, stay together for the sake of their preteen daughter, Sarah, and Zach finds refuge in the cave. “It was the one place that I knew more about than anyone else,” he narrates. “I wondered if everyone needed such a place, if everyone could have such a place.… Even when I was at home, Naught’s Cave became a place where I hid from the rest of the world and life, my excuse being that I was working.”
Zach’s and Meg’s lives become sadder still after Sarah is diagnosed with a terminal neurological condition called Batten disease. Zach copes by making himself the hero of a plot that reads something like an Indiana Jones movie written by the Coen brothers. Initially, Zach buys clothes online as a survival strategy, but the plot develops after he notices a series of cryptic messages pinned to the garments. These he interprets as pleas for help, and he decides to take action.
As Zach’s quest takes him to a small town in New Mexico and face-to-face with white supremacists who might be kidnapping and enslaving women from Ciudad Juárez, it adds up to a remarkable story, one that ends with a bizarre and unexpected joke that resonates with the book’s heavy themes, which Everett lands, as always, with impeccable precision. You’ll have to read the novel for yourself—whichever version you pick up—to understand it. Rest assured, though; as with the rest of Everett’s best work—Erasure, Glyph, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Dr. No, to name a few—you’ll be in good hands.•
Join us on May 18 at 5 p.m., when Everett will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Telephone. Please visit the Alta Clubhouse to discuss the book with your fellow California Book Club members. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
