There’s a moment of personal reckoning early on in Danzy Senna’s new novel. The biracial protagonist bristles with resentment when she meets the cool, brown-skinned Black man she thinks might be the future husband her psychic predicted at a party and he’s attached at the lips to his white girlfriend. Jane recognizes this is not her finest moment: “When you hated the same thing Strom Thurmond did — albeit for different reasons — you knew you were in problematic territory.”
The scene is funny, awkward and discomfiting, much like this book. With lacerating humor and a multitude of similarly revealing moments, Colored Television illuminates the axes around which its novelist protagonist Jane's life teeters. Race is one; so are marriage, parenting, money and art, and, most of all, the soul-destroying yet seductive realities of a writer's life in Los Angeles.
This cutting exploration of an artist’s striving and dreaming and flailing in the shadow of Hollywood’s dream factory perfectly complements Senna’s body of work. She’s a critically acclaimed novelist with semi-famous literary parents (one a prolific poet, the other an editor) whose celebrated interracial marriage imploded when she was 5. Across her first five books – three novels, a fraught but acclaimed family memoir and a short story collection — Senna earned a reputation for discerning reflections on the experience of being Black and biracial in America.
Turning that critical eye to the West Coast, Colored Television is an exhilarating yet poignant riff on the struggling artist as a wannabe middle-aged sellout. Jane is desperately trying to break out of genteel poverty through her writing — first, by finishing her second novel, a spectacularly unsaleable centuries-spanning saga of mixed-race history she’s been working on for a decade (a “mulatto War and Peace”), and parlaying that publication into tenure in her college teaching gig.
When that fails, Jane launches a perilous bid to become a TV writer. This quest thrusts Jane into the orbit of Hampton Ford, a powerful and ethically challenged producer. Fiercely ambitious and bombastic, Ford resembles a mashup of Kenya Barris (Black-ish) and Tyler Perry (Madea). His mandate is to create diverse content for his diversity-challenged studio. Working with Ford puts her at odds with her husband, Lenny, a painter and stickler for sticking to the calling of higher art. The show she pitches is simply a comedy about “mulattos.” Ford thinks it could be “the greatest comedy about mulattos ever to hit the small screen … The Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies … Pinky meets — I don’t know — Modern Family. Imitation of Life meets, like, Everybody Loves Raymond.”
All sorts of shenanigans ensue. And it’s a wild ride. But throughout Colored Television, what stands out is the virtuosity of Senna’s writing, which is endlessly quotable and intensely, meaningfully provocative, wielding language and metaphor. Human frailty and facade are the primary subjects, but some of her most interesting descriptions focus on physical settings, such as the homes Jane’s family inhabits.
Unable to afford somewhere both safe and fitting the requirements of a family of two artists and two young children — Ruby is 8 and Finn is 6 — Jane and Lenny move from one temporary arrangement to another, prioritizing access to good schools. Their latest is an architecturally odd yet luxurious house-sitting gig in the home of Jane’s close grad school friend Brett MacNamara. A one-time literary writer like Jane, he’s become a successful screenwriter.
His house “sat at the peak of a mountain above the city, and yet the architect who had designed it, sometime in the sixties, had mysteriously decided to make the exterior a semicircle of unbroken wood, like a blind face. Only when you came into the junglelike courtyard, where lizards flitted across your path, did you discover that inside the semicircle, the house was all glass, staring into its own navel.” It’s a description that reverberates in the background throughout their time in the setting.
Those sentences reflect the roving eye of Jane, the class-conscious, frustrated novelist desperately seeking a middle-class stability she lacked in her own childhood. Caught between parents, she characterizes as “Huey Newton and Patty Hearst,” she’s not a product of the Loving generation so much as “Hating versus State of Virginia.” Much of what makes Colored Television such a fun trip is that we get to live and see the world through her wry and quick, often petty pronouncements. Her perspective flits from light to dark and subject to subject with the ease and efficiency of a bumblebee.
Senna revels in Jane’s unsparing gaze, her thoughts exposing more about Jane than the folks she’s watching. Some of the sharpest reads are about color and class. Once, “Jane and Lenny had teased each other about their various strains of Blackness. Jane said Lenny was Caviar Black, which she explained by riffing on Steve Martin’s line in The Jerk, saying he was born a rich Black child. Lenny said Jane was Pinky Black. As in the “kind of Black, you can’t see unless you’re squinting.” Their interplay is great. Ultimately, I wish I saw and learned more about Lenny. Since we're strapped into Jane's one-track mind, we only get glimpses of what's going on with him when she's pressed to focus on the marriage in order to save the family.
Jane’s meet-cute with her husband is a particular standout. When Jane met Lenny, she was “on the cusp of thirty-three” and unmoored. After a decade in Brooklyn, evading suitors and proposals, she yearned “to settle down, have a few kids, live in the suburbs.” So she saw a psychic who primed her that her love was just around the corner. Then she met Lenny at a party and it was a fiasco. One second, Jane was intentionally and provocatively describing her work as writing fiction “about mulattos.” The next moment, Jane and Lenny’s girlfriend Lilith were embroiled in verbal combat over a cute guy in a t-shirt and Vans. Lilith marks her territory with a putdown to Jane and extravagant displays of affection for Lenny. That exchange isn't the fun part; the insight comes through Jane’s inner monologue: “What did he see in her? Lilith was so thin, so frail, with pale, almost translucent skin and a giant mane of blonde hair. Was he necromantic? Did he have a thing for cadavers?”
More to the point, Jane thinks, “Why would an educated, sane Black man choose to be with a woman like that in this century? Did he not realize that once he married white, he would never get to talk unremitting s*** about white people again?” And then comes the clincher: “Jane came from a union like the one that Lilith and Lenny were about to embark on—ebony and ivory, together in disharmony—and yet... she could not bear the sight of interracial love. She could, but not when the man was Black and the woman was white.” It’s quick but revelatory. Within those paragraphs are dynamics of race and gender, which we could analyze for hours. Now imagine an entire novel full of those quiet parts said out loud. That’s Colored Television.
The voice might jolt some sensibilities — the race talk escalates in the way of old-school Chappelle's Show at its height or the cartoon The Boondocks. That’s a high bar. Senna's ungentle satire masterfully explores and explodes the psyche, not just the group chat, of a woman trying to level up on family, work and race in a post-post-racial America.
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