I Am Not Sidney Poitier [Paperback]

Prior to reading this book American Desert was the book I told people new to Everett to read in order to transition them to his style, in a sense. This book has taken the crown! Unlike Glyph, A History of The African American People (Proposed), and Erasure, this book tells its story without the (wonderful) intermissions and interludes that some readers have found disconcerting. (Those tools do, however, drive the story, in my opinion, just not in the straight-forward narrative sort of way.)

This book retains his "Percival Everett-ness" with all the whimsy, profundity, and outright silliness of his kind of storytelling. Often the protagonist is as bewildered by the nonsense swirling around him as the reader is, even while being quite absurd - and always cool in an offbeat way - in his own right. And, as one would expect from an Everett book, our hero is often an anti-hero to the world around him. That's all I will say about the story itself as the editorial review/synopsis gives a good description.

His work is timeless and this is no exception. You are pushed to laugh out loud, giggle, smile, and think. He has the ability, unmatched, in my opinion, to dissect the society we find ourselves in; praising - in his way - its positives, mocking its flaws, and finally giving the whole kit-and-kaboodle a firm finger (you know the one). This is a must read, especially if you are new to Everett's work. I hope he never gets tired of writing because I will never get tired of reading his work!

Although not up in the stratosphere of greatness with Erasure, this novel was a great read, and very much imbued with the ghost of Percival Everett. Not that he's dead. I mean his spirit, his Everett-ness: smart, wry, sardonic, concise, and lots of compelling characters, including Everett himself! I do hope he's not that cavalier as a teacher; I'm guessing not.

My one quibble is the one-dimensional Southern white characters. I do think there's still a lot that's worthy of skewering in the Southern white racial psyche, but some of the characters here are cardboard stereotypes trucked in from Tobacco Road. That seemed too easy.

Overall, though, this book is sort of an updating of Ellison's Invisible Man, with an even more absurdist twist. It's also very realistic, in that it exposes many of the absurdities that remain in our ever-raced and -classed society.

Let's get this out of the way: Although he may look a little like the famous actor, Not Sidney Poitier is not Sidney Poitier. Nor (as far as he knows) is he related, although he doesn't know who his father is. Instead, he's the wealthiest African American orphan in America, because his mother--the kind of woman who would name her son Not Sidney--invested all of her money in an upstart network headed by the dotty and lovable mogul Ted Turner, who is not really that Ted Turner (we are reassured in a foreword), who is married to an aerobics video queen named Jane Fonda, who becomes a father figure to Not Sidney when the boy's mother dies, and who has an attention span that wouldn't last the length of this sentence. And because Percival Everett is the type of author to spare no one, least of all himself, there's also a professor named Percival Everett who is not Percival Everett and who teaches a course in Nonsense Philosophy, which lives up to its name.

As you would imagine simply from the book's title, there's a lot of humor that resembles the old "Who's on First" routine. ("I'm Not Sidney Poitier." "Of course you're not.") And to top it off, young Not Sidney has the ability to mesmerize some people and get them to succumb to his commands--although practicing this superhuman power gets him into some awkward situations. But, as readers have come to expect from Everett, there's a serious, if always ambiguous, undertone to the humor, particularly once Not Sidney decides to leave Ted and Jane and strike out on his own.

The first time Not Sidney drives out of Atlanta, he is immediately arrested for driving while black and is impressed into a chain gang. In subsequent adventures, he buys his way into college ("Perhaps I'll get an education, perhaps not"), takes a class with Professor Everett ("I'll give you whatever grade you want, but A is such a nice letter"), joins a black fraternity ("This was when my life again became essentially a wildlife film"), and dates a young woman whose aristocratic family looks disdainfully on Not Sidney until they find out how much he's worth. Eventually he ends up in Smuteye, where he decides to help a community of sisters build a church, in spite of his personal agnosticism. ("I will not come to a place called Smuteye," his accountant wisely insists when Not Sidney calls him for money.)

"I Am Not Sidney Poitier" is a surprisingly touching novel about a young man who is on the lookout for both "a valuable learning experience, a rite of passage" and a worthy "way to spend my ridiculously easy-to-come-by money." There is a surrealism throughout Not Sidney's quest that echoes some of the better scenes of "Invisible Man." And it's one of the funniest books I've ever read--both for its blissfully goofy one-liners and for its scathing satire of the supposedly "post-racial" era in which we live. This might well be Everett's masterpiece.

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