Percival Everett and the Ambiguities of Experience

After finishing novelist Percival Everett’s comic novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier in 2010, the year after it came out, I began devouring his back catalog from the publisher Graywolf Press. I couldn’t stop. Why did I not know of this writer, whose every novel (not to mention his story collection Half an Inch of Water) felt original and different? I asked myself. It was, frankly, difficult to stay abreast of his titles, as they came out, seemingly, every year. Much of his work was playful and slightly jokey, yet the undercurrent was one of dead seriousness—the bullshit detector’s Let’s get down to the real stuff; don’t even try to blow smoke at me.