Me Either

I Am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel By Percival Everett.  Graywolf Press.  234 pp.  $16.00 ****

There is a kind of writer who plans out his books in great detail.  No less a literary eminence than P.G. Wodehouse, for instance, spent weeks planning and taking notes and writing outlines in order to write one of his Bertie Wooster novels, and once he had done that the actual writing went quickly (I’ve always found that odd, actually.  Sitting around imagining Bertie Wooster’s supposed adventures, which were the most trivial things imaginal?  Needless to say, it worked for Wodehouse.  His books were beautifully written and excellently constructed.)

Then there’s Percival Everett.  I’m convinced that he not only writes the first chapter with no idea about the second, but that he writes the first sentence (in this case, “I am the ill-starred fruit of a hysterical pregnancy, and surprisingly, I am not hysterical myself”) entirely out of the blue, with no idea what the second will be.  He relies on his verbal and inventive powers.  He entirely wings it.

In this case, I might even guess that he created the title (which I think is absolutely brilliant.  I knew I had to read this book when I saw that title) with no idea what the book would be.  It certainly wasn’t what I expected.  It just kept knocking me for a loop.

So let me scratch the surface of the plot line: an African American woman named Portia Poitier, offbeat in the extreme, to the point where you might think no one would couple with her, wanted a child so much that she became pregnant (what might normally be called a hysterical pregnancy).  She was in that condition for 24 months, and though she looked terribly pregnant, people were convinced it was all in her head.  At the end of that time, however, she actually gave birth to a son, and named him—to give you some idea of how offbeat she was—Not Sidney, just so he wouldn’t be confused with You Know Who.  Weirdly enough, he grew up to look exactly like Sidney Poitier, so the name was helpful.  At the same time, all through his life, it led to a lot of Who’s on First type conversations, which often got him beaten up when he was young.  Conversations like:

“What’s your name?”

“Not Sidney Poitier.”

“All right then, but what is it?”

“Not Sidney.”

“I know.  But what is it?”

And so on.  He got battered around quite a bit.

This is a novel in which the most interesting character—Not Sidney’s mother—disappears early on, leaving him an orphan as a child.  I would love to read a novel devoted to her life.  But the woman was a financial genius of some kind, and invested early on, eventually acquiring a commanding share, of what I think is called Turner Enterprises, the broadcasting network.

Not only did she know Ted Turner personally, but he became a surrogate father to Not Sidney, so that Not actually lived with him and Jane Fonda, once went sailing with the two of them and a third person whose name was—are you ready for this?—Wanda Fonda.  Not Sidney had learned a technique to mesmerize people, it was akin to hypnotism, so he mesmerized Wanda into stealing Jane’s bikini top while she was sun bathing and throwing it into the ocean, so Not could see Jane’s boobs.  Weirdly enough, Jane didn’t mind at all; she barely noticed.  She was happy to sit around on the yacht topless.  And actually, her boobs were mildly disappointing.  They weren’t much bigger than Not’s.

Can you see why I don’t think Percival Everett planned this book beforehand?

It becomes a coming-of-age novel of Not Sidney Poitier.  Though an orphan, he is vastly wealthy, to the point where he can do anything he wants.  So he buys a car and tries to drive through Georgia but is immediately arrested for driving while black, thrown into jail on bogus charges, gets sprung by a weird accident in which he is chained to a white inmate (you may recall that S. Poitier made a movie like that[1]), and eventually makes his way back to Atlanta.

He enrolls in Morehouse College, where one of his professors (teaching a class called the Theory of Nonsense) is none other than Percival Everett himself (though the actual Percival Everett teaches at Stanford).  Not falls for a young woman from nearby Spelman who is so light-skinned that he wonders if she’s white; she takes him home to DC where her extremely conservative family is all light-skinned, as are all their friends, and they are prejudiced against this rather dark young man, at least until they discover how rich he is.  This is very similar to another movie starring S. Poitier[2], and in the novel’s third major episode, where Not Sidney is once again traveling in the South, he runs into a sheriff, and enacts many scenes, that are right out of In the Head of the Night.  Our protagonist is Not Sidney Poitier.  Yet his life keeps echoing Sidney’s movies.

All of this is hilariously funny, at least as funny as a Bertie Wooster (much funnier, in my book, just because it’s so off the wall).  And if it doesn’t add up to anything—the only complaint I could make about it—maybe that’s not the point (the Bertie Wooster novels didn’t either).  We no more know what Percival Everett is going to do than Not Sidney knows what Professor Percival Everett is going to say, we’re constantly being surprised.  The man loves verbal play of all kinds.  Wanda Fonda indeed.  That’s refreshing in a world where other writers are nothing but predictable.

[1] The Defiant Ones

[2] Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner