I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Everett Percival

An irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America
I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.
Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation.
Percival Everetts hilarious new novel follows Not Sidneys tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: Whats your name? a kid would ask. Not Sidney, I would say. Okay, then what is it? Percival Everett is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of seventeen novels, including The Water Cure, Wounded, and Erasure. Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with a strange name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunately, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation. Percival Everetts hilarious new novel follows Not Sidneys tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than-watchful eye of his landlord, Ted Turner, Not get arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, and sleuths a murder case in Smuteye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: Whats your name? a kids would ask. Not Sidney, I would say. Okay, then what is it? Constantly shifting modes, from comic realism to tall tale, from recounted dreams to refashioned movie plots, Everetts hall of mirrors narrative presents African American identity itself as rooted in contradiction.--Gregory Leon Miller, San Francisco Chronicle Percival Everett made news 20 years ago at the South Carolina State House, where he stopped in the middle of a speech--he had been invited by the Legislature--and refused to go on because of the presence of the Confederate flag. This gesture initiated a controversy that resulted, several years later, in the flags removal. For this Everett will be a footnote in American history. His work, however, deserves much more attention than a footnote in American literary history. Is any American writer as undervalued as Everett? Does anyone in America write funnier books? Such questions come to mind with Everetts 17th novel and latest tour de force of purposeful nonsense, I Am Not Sidney Poitier . . . As always, Everett relies upon capriciousness to ward off reductive interpretations. And as always, his capricious style accords with a serious purpose--in this case a provocative exploration of the unstable nature of African American identity. The name Not Sidney suggests an identity with origins in a negative truth--he is viewed not for who he is, but against who he is not. As indeed was the original: Sidney Poitier, the movie star himself--shimmering on the silver screen, his Bahamian accent erased--was from the start a reflection of African American pride and compromise, and of the wider cultures hopes and fears. Constantly shifting modes, from comic realism to tall tale, from recounted dreams to refashioned movie plots, Everetts hall of mirrors narrative presents Africa