Book review
Color Television: A Novel
By Danzy Senna
Riverhead: 288 pages, $29
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“Colored Television” is a novel about capitalism, race, gender, parenthood, creativity and longing; it is, in short, a great American novel.
It's an exciting way to begin a review, but Senna's story, set in Los Angeles, is also about the perpetual divide between commerce and art, and the novelist's deft handling of all these multiple themes deserves such praise.
The author’s comedic depiction of the travails of Jane (his protagonist, a creative, mixed-race, economically vulnerable Gen X writer) brilliantly portrays 2020 America, where multiple identities are not only intersectional but constantly in flux and available to be worn as fashionable costumes or claimed by anyone seeking prestige.
Senna's mastery of writing shines through in “Colored Television.” Critical categories insist that farce is an inferior form of humor to satire, but that is just another form of the kind of artificial control whose tensions run through “Colored Television.” Senna's humor blends with his deep understanding of cultural foibles and the human heart to produce a novel that is at once a laugh-out-loud cultural comedy and a fascinating novel of ideas.
Jane and Lenny have been a couple since they met years earlier in New York, when a fortune teller told Jane to find “a black man who was funny, a black man who wore ‘West Coast’ shoes.” Lenny is sporting a funny T-shirt and a pair of Vans.
“On one of their first dates… Jane said Lenny was Caviar Black… that he was born a rich black kid. Lenny said Jane was… Pinky Black. Like the kind of black you can’t see unless you squint.” The fear of ending up as a “mulatto spinster” was what prompted Jane to accept her sister’s gift of a session with a psychic in the first place.
Of all Jane’s multiple identities, Gen X is the most “undisputed.” And “what made her most Gen X of all was that she was part of the first mixed-race baby boom, whose parents were from the first generation of legalized interracial marriages.”
“Like any black Gen Xer, she hadn’t had time to worry about microaggressions, because of the good old macroaggressions she’d experienced: white kids throwing rocks at her head,” along with racist slurs and objects left on the family porch. But Jane never doubted that she was black, that “she had been lucky to have been raised in the early days of mulatto militancy… Being black was the way to be.”
In graduate school, Jane befriended her friend Brett, another child of divorced, mixed-race parents. They both started out writing literary novels, but Brett later opted to pursue a highly successful career in Hollywood. Lenny and Jane are staying at Brett's luxurious home in Los Angeles while he is abroad for a year.
Brett tells Jane that he hopes to make a personal television show, “with two mixed-race leads…when the subject of race came up, it would be more humorous than something tortured and heavy.” But would such a show contribute to another friend’s sense that multiracial families are a fad without substance, just another marketing angle monetized in glitzy Hollywood?
Meanwhile, Jane and Lenny struggle to survive as a creative couple. Jane works as a non-tenured professor and writes after hours.. Lenny's refusal to do what is considered authentic “black art” means that his art goes largely unnoticed.
Parenting takes up much of Lenny and Jane's life as a couple. Despite resenting her youth spent shuttling between divorced parents, Jane sees her own children raised in a kind of itinerary, following their parents from house-sitting jobs to cheap apartments.
When her agent rejects her second novel—a sprawling, multigenerational saga that Lenny calls a “mulatto War and Peace”—Jane is faced with the eternal question of how a wife and mother can find time to make art. “The thing about being a woman, a mother, and a wife is that if you wanted to be anything more than that, you had to hire another wife. Someone had to be the wife of the family.”
Senna's keen observations about wealth, class and race erode the amorphous rock under which the couple is trapped.
In Los Angeles, while Lenny struggles with artistic categories, Jane wants a stable place for her children and for loud rumors of financial insecurity to be silenced. The irony of race and class is that the white majority sees the desire to be middle class as a desire to become white. Jane’s father tells her that “black people didn’t want to be white… they just wanted to have what white people had.” Race and money, he says, are so mixed up that white people don’t understand them.
Grieving the loss of ten years of work on the rejected novel, Jane panics and tries to follow in Brett’s footsteps to land a job in troubled Hollywood. When she is hired to develop a television series about a mixed-race family, she hides it from Lenny, who is not driven by the same economic fears and would object to her “selling out.” Sure enough, as she works on the new writing project, Jane watches her identity as a literary author fade away.
The complexity of all these themes contained in a single novel might have intimidated a less experienced writer. Senna turns what could have been ponderous into a celebratory triumph filled with joy and love. The moniker Great American Novel was retired after it became clear that its primary concerns were those of white men. In “Television in Color,” Senna lays claim to the title. This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard.
Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.
