Danzy Senna’s “Colored Television” is among the first major novels of 2024’s truncated fall book season — truncated because few publishers want to release a novel anywhere near the blast zone of the November election — but it feels more like a summer blockbuster.
It’s about a struggling mixed-race couple in Los Angeles — she’s a writer, he’s a painter — and it has its dark corners. But it’s no knock to suggest that Senna has, in the way that a peripatetic filmmaker might display, while cracking her knuckles, shrewd commercial instincts.
“Colored Television” is funny, foxy and fleet; it’s aspirational about money and luxury items and mocking of those aspirations. There are times, especially near the end, when you might wish Senna pushed deeper into the themes and the pain she lays bare, but the jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart. The popular novelist and the literary (whatever that means) novelist in her are like the two halves of a black-and-white cookie, which she adroitly crumbles.
It will surprise no one who has followed Senna’s career to learn that her protagonist, Jane, is a biracial woman married to a Black man. Senna is the daughter of the poet and novelist Fanny Howe, who is white, and the writer and editor Carl Senna, who is Black. She herself is married to the writer Percival Everett, the author most recently of “James,” a reimagining of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Nearly everything Senna has written — three previous novels, a memoir, a book of stories — has been about mixed-race life in America. She makes you feel the joys, the discontents, the estrangements.
Senna knows that we know this. The reader is in on the joke when Jane finally turns in the baggy monster of a second novel she’s been working for nearly a decade, a collagelike and “manspreading” American epic of biracial life — that has nearly destroyed her career and her family, only to have her agent remark that “you’re doing yourself a disfavor by writing about race again — by writing about, you know, the whole mixed-race thing. We’d love to see you expand your territory, Jane.”
Jane has already passed through stages of optimism, amusement, perplexity, boredom, despair and horror about her own manuscript. In response to her agent, if only in her mind, she fires back an endless ack-ack round of middle-finger salutes.
Jane dislikes being told she writes about mixed-race people. “I write about mulattos,” she says. Asked if that term is offensive, she replies it’s accurate. “Biracial could be any old thing. Korean and Panamanian or Chinese and Egyptian. But a mulatto is always specifically a mulatto.”
The characters in “Colored Television” are wonderful talkers; they’re wits and improvisers who clock the absurdities of the human condition. You often feel you’re listening in on a three-bottles-into-it dinner party. On the drawbacks of a Black man marrying a white woman: “he would never get to talk unremitting [expletive] about white people again.” On Brooklyn: “a Kraków ghetto of mulatto spinsters.” On how to dress to impress white real estate agents: “everybody loved a Black man in a yellow polo shirt.” On how Nigerians have the chutzpah of the never enslaved: “Think how pretty and poised we’d be if we’d come first class on Virgin Atlantic instead of via the [expletive] Middle Passage.”
You’d want to be the last person to leave any room these people are in, lest the door hit you on the way out and you become a target for their poison-tipped darts.
In her 2003 essay collection “The Wedding Dress,” Howe wrote that an awful thing about being poor with children is that you will do anything for them, sometimes illegal things, and “your adaptation to crookedness can alter your personality.”
In “Colored Television,” Jane and Lenny, her husband, have two young children, one of whom might have a learning disability. They have maxed-out credit cards. Their work is not selling. They teach but tenure eludes them. Their sheets are stained, and their Ikea bookshelves are cheap. She worries about her kids being trapped in third-rate school systems. “Janky” is a word she uses to describe the details of the kind of life she fears.
The couple luck into a house-sitting gig for Brett, wealthy television writer. (He’s a “tragic mulatto” because he’s a fiction writer who sold out.) Jane considers herself a bohemian, but rare is the bohemian, this book posits, who does not want to be so in a splendid house or apartment.
She’s been deprived of choice material goods for so long that she has hungry eyes for the luxury displayed everywhere around her: personal trainers, Wolf stoves, labradoodles (“Nothing bad could happen to a family with a labradoodle”), good vintages of wine, Herman Miller Aeron chairs, claw-footed tubs, Beni Ourain rugs, Scandinavian pans, German coffee machines, slouchy linen couches, electric Porsches. She dreams of a family portrait in matching Hanna Andersson pajamas, a notion Lenny would stamp on as if it were a cockroach.
Passages like the following, which wallow in a gauzy milieu of middle-class values, will make half this novel’s readers want to barf and half nod in silent assent — and some to barf and nod at the same time, which will get more of it on their trousers.
First, she would launch her career, then, after a series of difficult but teachable-moment love affairs, she would meet The One — her future mate — and settle down somewhere outside the city where they would spawn beautiful, gifted children. Later, when said children grew up and went to college at a school that looked exceptionally good on a bumper sticker on her Audi, Jane would spend the rest of her days writing novels and tending to her yard in Eileen Fisher clothes, her face set in deep thought like a kind of Pema Chödrön for the biracial set. She would age gracefully as a rich Buddhist.
Senna writes this sort of thing then she catches you up short. She manages to bend nearly conformist cliché back on itself.
The plot of “Colored Television” becomes more adhesive when Jane lies her way into a meeting with Brett’s television agent. She’s done being a suffering novelist; she wants an easier life, and a vastly more remunerative one. She pours a lot of scorn on fiction writing, in the way that only a flailing writer can do.
Jane says that “being a novelist in Los Angeles was not unlike being an Amish person,” adding, “I mean, it’s quaint, a little bizarre, an extreme lifestyle choice. Like wearing a bonnet and churning your own butter.” (If Senna herself really believed this, this novel would be a script instead.)
Teaching is worse. She is a member of Generation X and culturally she is well-nigh indestructible, but the new generations are too sensitive to triggers and can’t countenance sprawling novels because “their brains had not evolved for that kind of reading experience.” In frustration, Jane begins to assign “only minimalist autofiction by queer POC authors to her undergraduates.”
Jane’s ideas for a prestige television show about mulattos are an awful lot like the ones Brett wants to sell. Is this theft? She and Lenny drink all of Brett’s expensive wine. The long Eden of their courtship is in the past. Their marriage is crumbling. They need to move out of Brett’s place soon. Everything is coming unstitched at once.
Many dark threads run through the fabric of this narrative, but mostly they remain unpulled. “Make it worse,” Jane sometimes told her writing students. It’s advice she might have sometimes taken herself.
In the end, Senna delivers a mostly inspired, and mostly happy, series of narrative double axels that will make you reconsider who the true sellouts are. This novel does not predict the candidacy of Kamala Harris, but it feels like a book for the Harris moment, in some very sweet ways.
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