Steve Reads

The first thing to realize about this novel is that the narrator’s name is, in fact, “Not Sidney Poitier”. That is, his mother was Mrs. Poitier, and she named him “Not Sidney.”

The second fact about the book, which sets the tone, is that Not Sidney goes to live with Ted Turner. Not a metaphorical Ted Turner — the real Ted Turner, the guy who founded CNN. Mrs. Poitier, it turns out, bought tens of thousands of shares of Turner Broadcasting System stock back when the company was just starting out, and hitched a ride with TBS on the way up. Ted Turner thinks this poor black woman has pluck and ingenuity, and becomes close friends with her. When she dies, Turner takes Not Sidney into his home — actually, gives Not Sidney his own home somewhere within the Turner compound — and lets him roam free. He has enough money that he will never have to worry about paying for anything, ever.

The third fact is that Not Sidney comes to look more and more like Sidney Poitier — the famous actor, that is.

Fourth: Not Sidney ends up with a teacher at Morehouse College named Percival Everett, who either speaks nonsense because he’s trying to teach a lesson, or because he’s just a nonsensical human.

In sum, then: in a book by Percival Everett, who portrays himself as a peddler of erudite nonsense, we meet a wealthy Sidney Poitier lookalike named Not Sidney Poitier, living with the Turner family and fantasizing about seeing Jane Fonda’s (Turner’s wife’s) breasts.

Oh, did I forget to mention that Not Sidney has mind-control powers? Yeah, well he does. By staring at someone long enough, he can usually get them to do his bidding. Out on the Turner-Fonda yacht, Not Sidney uses these powers to convince Jane to toss her bikini top overboard. Breasts aren’t always involved in his mind control. It also doesn’t always work, for that matter; when it doesn’t, people tend to get miffed that he’s staring so intently at them. They kick his butt for this sin every now and again.

While we’re floating free of the constraints of reality or of ordinary plots, why not have a few random women perform oral sex on our narrator? This happens more often than not in mildly grounded fantasy novels written by men, and it certainly happens in I Am Not Sidney Poitier. (I hypothesize that Philip Roth made this sort of thing respectable.)

Our hero wanders from place to place. He ends up the Deep South with toothless, incestuous parodies of rednecks. He goes off to college, not because he needs it to get ahead — remember, he’s wealthy beyond belief — but because … well, it’s not clear why he does. He just does. He starts dating a fellow-student, who eventually brings him back to her anti-affirmative action, pro-business black family because Not Sidney is really black, and she wants to shock her parents. His trip to the girlfriend’s parents’ house is filled with a few notes of fantasy, in the sense that the world bends itself to make life easy for Not Sidney.

The book is a bit of fun candy. It’s possible it’s trying to make a bigger point, maybe something about conservative self-hating blacks, but I think that’s just in there to poke some fun. And having read a second Everett book, I’m starting to suspect that the caricatured Clarence Thomas-type character is an Everett hobbyhorse.

It’s definitely worth the read, especially given the two or three hours it will take. I guess this would count as “beach reading,” in a way that Sunk Costs and Market Structure: Price Competition, Advertising, and the Evolution of Concentration might not.