I Am Not Sidney Poitier

I Am Not Sidney Poitier Review

Not Sidney Poitier — that is his full legal name, given at birth by his mother in what the novel treats as a fact requiring no further explanation — enters the world with a name that announces his central problem: he will spend his life being seen as someone he is not. His mother’s early death leaves him in the hands of Ted Turner (the actual Ted Turner, who appears as a recurring character), and his inheritance of a fortune in Turner Broadcasting stock makes him one of the wealthiest young Black men in America. This does not simplify his situation.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier, published in 2009, is Percival Everett’s most deliriously comic novel. Its structure mirrors the film career of the actual Sidney Poitier — The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner — subjecting its narrator to scenarios that echo the films with the logic of a particularly dark farce. Not Sidney is shackled to a white man in a chain-gang escape. He encounters a community of nuns in need of help building something. He is repeatedly mistaken for the famous actor, a confusion that the novel uses to examine the peculiar blindness of white America when confronted with a Black man.

The comedy is broad and, at times, burlesque — but Everett’s comic control is precise. The absurdism is never merely for its own sake; each mirroring of a Poitier film says something specific about the films and about the society that made them. Sidney Poitier’s career was built on a particular kind of Black dignity that white audiences could receive without threat. Not Sidney Poitier shares nothing but a name with that persona, and the gap between them is the novel’s subject.

Everett himself appears as a professor character named “Percival Everett,” who delivers lectures of cheerful opacity and offers Not Sidney the novel’s closest thing to wisdom. It is a metafictional joke that earns its self-indulgence: the author’s presence in the text makes explicit what is always implicit in this kind of writing — that the novel is an examination of how stories get told about people who did not write them.

Percival Everett’s Larger Project

I Am Not Sidney Poitier is best understood as one move in a career-long project. Percival Everett is among the most prolific and least classifiable of contemporary American novelists, a writer who has refused to be pinned to a single subject, style, or expectation — itself a response to the pressures placed on Black writers to produce a particular kind of book. His 2001 novel Erasure (adapted into the film American Fiction) skewered the publishing industry’s appetite for “authentic” Black suffering, and his later James reimagined Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. I Am Not Sidney Poitier belongs to the comic, satirical end of this body of work, but it shares the same underlying concern: the way Black identity is authored by others, and the consequences that follow from the gap between the self and the projected image.

Recognizing this context deepens the novel’s central joke. The narrator’s name is not just absurdist whimsy; it is a literalization of Everett’s recurring subject. To be “Not Sidney Poitier” is to be defined entirely by negation, by reference to a famous image one did not choose and cannot escape.

A Comic Novel With Serious Aims

The pleasures of the book are genuinely those of comedy — the timing, the escalating absurdity, the deadpan narration of impossible situations. But its targets are precise. By routing his narrator through the plots of Poitier’s most celebrated films, Everett exposes the racial logic those films were built to manage: the carefully non-threatening dignity that made Black excellence palatable to white audiences of the 1960s. Not Sidney’s encounters reveal how readily people still see a Black man as a type rather than a person.

Readers who enjoy literary satire, picaresque comedy, and metafiction will find this among Everett’s most entertaining novels — a fast, funny, intellectually serious book that rewards both a casual read and a closer one. It is an excellent entry point for readers discovering Everett through the success of American Fiction and James.

The Picaresque Tradition, Updated

Structurally, I Am Not Sidney Poitier revives one of the oldest forms in the novel’s history: the picaresque, in which a roguish or naïve hero moves through a series of loosely connected episodes that expose the absurdities of the society he passes through. From Don Quixote and Candide onward, the picaresque has been the satirist’s favorite vehicle precisely because its episodic looseness allows the author to range across a whole social landscape. Everett uses the form to send Not Sidney across a cross-section of American life — the South, the wealthy, academia, the criminal-justice system — and at each stop the comedy doubles as critique. The episodes don’t build toward a conventional climax so much as accumulate into a panorama of a country still organized, often invisibly, around race.

What keeps the novel from collapsing into a string of sketches is the steadiness of its narrator. Not Sidney’s bemused, faintly melancholy voice — observing the chaos around him with a detachment that never quite becomes cynicism — gives the book its through-line and its heart. He is a genuinely sympathetic creation, and the reader’s investment in his bewilderment is what turns the comedy into something that lingers. By the end, the joke of his name has curdled into something closer to a question: who gets to decide who a person is? It is a measure of Everett’s skill that a novel this funny leaves that question ringing.

Our rating: 4.2/5