Percival Everett, _I Am Not Sidney Poitier_

 NOT EVERETT'S MOST audacious novel...but that is a high bar. 

The narrator's mother, a Poitier but unrelated to the famous actor, named him "Not Sidney," which is a good joke and sets the novel up for the kind of wordplay S. J. Perelman wrote for the Marx Brothers. 

     "Are you not Sidney Poitier?"

    "Yes, I am Not Sidney Poitier."

The narrator's mother also invested in Turner Broadcasting when it was just a blip of a startup, so her death, when the narrator is just eleven, leaves him breathtakingly wealthy.

So the novel is a bit like Great Expectations. Like Pip, Not Sidney comes of age with no worries about how to provide for himself, and encounters a number of vivid characters who help, or hinder, or both as he figures life out--with the important difference, of course, that being a young Black man in the South is quite distinct from being a young gentleman in Victorian London, especially in one's relations with the police. He is also a bit like Voltaire's Candide, though, as these encounters have the effect of knocking down one or another illusion about how things work.

The extra Everettian fillip to the novel is that Not Sidney keeps finding himself in scenarios that are funhouse  reflections of Sidney's films--The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, Buck and the Preacher, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Not Sidney physically resembles Sidney, we are told, and does so increasingly as the novel progresses, until he is finally actually taken for Sidney. What's this about? I'm not sure--it reminded me of Max Beerbohm's "The Happy Hypocrite," a story that makes literal the old proverb of wearing a mask that one's face eventually matches. I'm still puzzling this one out.