Book Review: I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett

I mentioned in January that one of my reading projects for 2025 is to work my way through Percival Everett's back catalogue. I started off with Erasure, which I reviewed here last month; this one was next up.

I'm surprised to find myself saying it, but this book is even better than Erasure (and I say this as a reader who highly rated Erasure). I'm starting to think Everett's not capable of writing anything less than a brilliant book. Last year's James blew me away, and got me started on my current Everett kick, and I'm delighted that there are several more waiting to catch up on.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a very funny novel, with an unusual mixture of highbrow referential humour, absurdism, and frank slapstick. It follows the story of a young Black man, Not Sidney Poitier, whose secret wealth puts him in a strange limbo between negative assumptions based on his skin and the shallow but positive responses people have when learning about his wealth.

Each of the chapters of the book is a barely-pastiched version of a Sidney Poitier film or films, which both added to the humour and resonance, but also provided a rationale for the disjointed leapfrogging from one circumstance to the next. I spotted The Defiant Ones, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, No Way Out, Lilies of the Field and In the Heat of the Night, but there may well be more. While none of those films are comedies (well, arguably Lilies of the Field could be considered a dramedy), Everett draws out and plays with the inherent absurdities of the stories in ways that make them both funny and disorienting.

Everett's decision to use real people's names in the book, but casually disclaim that they shouldn't be read as the real people so named, is bold, hilarious and very effective. "Ted Turner" is one of the best characters in the book - if ever a character was written with more flaming ADHD, I have yet to read one - and his "Jane Fonda" is an unsympathetic but compelling cameo. The best of all, though, is "Percival Everett", the book's Professor of Nonsense who carries the author's name but, according to the preface, not his identity. The dialogue between "Turner" and "Everett" when they eventually meet is among the funniest and most madcap ridiculousness I have ever read, and I loved it.

A theme that is common between all of Everett's books that I have read so far, but perhaps most prominent of all in this one, is the stress and disassociation experienced by Black men who have to perform "Black man" (with all its situational meanings) for an audience. While the lead character of Erasure, in frustrated rage, plays up to stereotypes to write a blockbuster novel, Not Sidney's journey is less direct and more emotionally muted, and he doesn't really buy into others' ideas about him. Both, however, end up in the same place - with their identities uncertain, functionally dissolved by the weight of the gaze upon them and within them.

I might be alone in this, but I read Everett as an heir to (and certainly as good as) one of the greatest American writers of the modern era, Kurt Vonnegut. The satire and humour is very similarly pitched, and like Vonnegut, Everett shines an unrelenting light on the fallacies and stupidities of society and culture, skewering it with laughter.

Overall, very highly recommend. 9 - 9.25/10 for me.