Book Report: I am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett
The Book: I am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett (2009)
The Goods: I am Not Sidney Poitier is – blarg – a bit hard to blurb. It’s the story of a young man named Not Sidney Poitier who looks, in fact, an awful lot like Sidney Poitier, and his coming-of-age, which the author (Percival Everett, not to be confused with the novel’s character Percival Everett, who turns up throughout the story along with a hilarious fictional version of Ted Turner) casts as an intertextual adventure through Sidney Poitier films. (Did the best I could, briefly.)
The Report: Book club really enjoyed I am Not Sidney Poitier. We found it nearly impossible, though, to talk about the novel without moving the conversation into more theoretical territory: what postmodern narratives can or can’t achieve; why our approaches to the book may have created very different types of enjoyment (some readers felt that this was an enjoyable, thoughtful text that ultimately didn’t move them while others – okay, really just ME — felt greatly moved by the identity crisis at the heart of the novel AND how that may have been informed by our relationship to literature/film in general); and how literature constructs identity and race. But we did also talk about THE book! ok
