Ted and Not Sidney spend lots of time together, Ted unleashing a seemingly ceaseless discursive monologue from which Not Sidney is eager to learn. He takes Not Sidney in when he’s left orphaned, setting him up with his own staff in a wing of his Atlanta mansion from which Not Sidney gazes at Jane Fonda, Ted’s wife. Ted Turner visits shortly before she dies, keen to thank the woman who saw a future in his fledgling company. His mother gave birth to him after a surprisingly long gestation, raising him to be a sceptical reader and curious. Not Sidney has no idea who his father is. It’s the story of the eponymous Not Sidney whose prescient mother invested in Ted Turner’s broadcasting company, leaving him already rich at the age of seven when she dies in suburban Los Angeles. He’s prolific, too, but few of his novels are available here in the UK so I jumped at the chance of reviewing I Am Not Sidney Poitier.
Newland stumbled upon Everett’s Graceland in a second-hand bookshop in London and went back for a copy of Erasure, the book that introduced me to this inventive, smart, very funny novelist. (Jan.I’ve borrowed that subtitle from Courttia Newland’s introduction to Percival Everett’s novel, first published in the US in 2009. By Frenzy's end, the mind of this turbulent god remains as unknowable as in the beginning. The choppiness of the narrative, however, prevents any real tension and saps the book's effectiveness. Having slandered Semele and suggested that Zeus was not Dionysos's father, Agave eventually goes mad, killing her son, Pentheus. But the myth that shapes the book, is that of Agave, daughter of Kadmos and sister of Semele. Elsewhere, Vlepo observes the tragic death of Eurydice, and Orpheus's journey to Hades in an attempt to reclaim her. Leaping through time and space with ease, Vlepo revisits events like Zeus's seduction of Semele, Dionysos's mother, and Zeus's subsequent revelation of his godhood, during which he incinerates Semele with his brilliance.
Curious to understand his own experiences, Dionysos sends Vlepo into the ""temporal soup"" of his own godly memories, where he observes his master's experiences from different perspectives, such as that of a tick on the god's skull. Abandoning the American West of books such as Watershed and The Big Picture, the prolific novelist brings his sharp eye for the mutability of identity, the clash of myth and culture, and an offbeat humor, to this iconoclastic study in Greek mythology. What transpires inside the mind of a god? Specifically, inside the mind of Dionysos, Greek god of wine, pleasure and eroticism? Everett's playful novel attempts to answer that question, weaving together the god's memories as narrated by Vlepo, Dionysos's mortal assistant and constant companion.
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