Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

I'm officially in love with Percival Everett, I think.

It started when I learned that he'd written a book called A History of the African American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond as Told To Percival Everett and James Kincaid. My sense of humor is too cocked for me to not be drawn to such a long and ridiculous title. Benjamin Rosenbaum's similarly titled "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum" is among my favorite short stories, after all.

While I waited for that to arrive on Amazon, I picked another of his books up at the library.

35) I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett.

The title, in addition to being a strikingly on-the-nose sentiment, is possibly a spoof on Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, as the novel is also concerned in some sense with the evolving cultural mores of today's youth culture. The novel's title character is named Not Sidney Poitier, a curious moniker his mentally ill mother assigned to him for no clear reason we're ever given. It turns out that as he grows up, he begins to closely resemble his non-namesake, and Everett has Not Sidney endure a series of adventures that more or less directly parody famous Poitier movies.

The novel begins Shandyan, with a very funny and very peculiar narration of the narrator's birth. It ends Borgesian, with the lines between Not Sidney and Sidney blurring in almost ecstatic ways. And on almost any other book I was writing up for this community I would hesitate to make those comparisons, because I'm growing wary of making naive comparisons to white authors on this community, wary of slotting them into a paradigm where they're considered second class citizens. But among the questions Everett seems to be asking, particularly in a central passage where Not Sidney experiences Not Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, is what makes a particular narrative "white" or "black". What separates Dick from Delany, what separates Baldwin from Hemingway, what separates Sidney Poitier from Not Sidney Poitier, and what separates Not Sidney Poitier from billionaire Ted Turner, who has a hysterical turn here as Not Sidney's eccentric adoptive father figure. So it's vitally important that Everett run his novel up against Tristram Shandy and David Copperfield and The Metamorphosis, in addition to the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Sidney Poitier and the rest of his "black narratives". The result of this mishmash is a literature of suffering and hope, joyously combined.

36)Erasure by Percival Everett

All three novels of Everett's that I've read feature some form of self-insertion. In I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is a Morehouse professor who teaches a course on the Philosophy of Nonsense and offers Not Sidney all manner of entirely unhelpful and nonsensical advice. In A History of the African American People, Everett is a Berkeley professor contracted by Strom Thurmond to help set his thoughts down on paper. In Erasure, Thelonious Ellison (a name which in a way is the same as Not Sidney) is a middle class novelist and teacher who has just published a novel that parodies the post-modern literary establishment and is recognizably similar to Everett's Glyph in form and content.

Ellison takes a leave of absence from his teaching job at Berkeley after his sister is shot and he is left to care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. In the interim, he sits down and writes a parody of one of the "ghetto novels" that has become so popular lately as epitomized by Push. Everett sets down 60 pages of the novel within the novel, an ebonics-laden tale of violence and drugs titled My Pafology.

The novel poses fascinating questions about authenticity as "My Pafology", retitled "Fuck", becomes a best-seller and wins the National Book Award. Everett is brutal and funny as he mocks Oprah, the literary establishment, liberal guilt, and our desire to find a fiction that somehow communicates the truth of human suffering.

37) A History of the African American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond as Told To Percival Everett and James Kincaid by Percival Everett (and James Kincaid? I'm honestly not sure what Kincaid's contributions were, which is part of the point)

An epistolary narrative tracing the development of the titular historical memoir, from its conception in the blurry mind of a Thurmond aide through its development by a desperate Simon and Schuster editor and the bewildered ghostwriting undertaken by the team of Everett and Kincaid, writers in the Berkeley English department, one white and one black.

Unlike a lot of such parody novels, Everett doesn't supply you with any sort of anchoring character. Everyone you meet is just as poorly adjusted to society. They let their perversions, their foibles, their weaknesses drive them. Thurmond's aide misrepresents his relationship with his boss. The editor abuses his position of authority to make sexual advances on his assistant. Kincaid is obnoxiously overcareful to avoid offending his black colleague, while Everett abuses this deference for amusement and personal benefit.

And somehow, amid a cast of misshapen lunatics, serious thoughts begin to emerge about the nature of history and narrative, about the way we read the world around us. Somehow, misguided as he is, Strom Thurmond's insistence that he is more responsible for the history of the African-American people than anyone begins to teach us how to ask the right questions about who writes history and how they interpret it. The book shows when and how to question the historical canon, when and how to embrace minority opinions, asks whether it's ever necessary to decide on a definitive answer. And I have no idea how Everett does this. It's magic, how he finds form in his chaos.