There’s a moment of personal reckoning early on in Danzy Senna’s new novel. The biracial protagonist is incensed when she meets the cold, brown-skinned black man she thinks might be the future husband her psychic predicted at a party and he ends up hooking up with his white girlfriend. Jane realizes this isn’t her finest moment: “When you hate the same thing Strom Thurmond hated—albeit for different reasons—you know you’re in trouble territory.”
This scene is funny, awkward, and uncomfortable, just like this book. With its poignant humor and countless similar revealing moments, Color TV illuminates the axes on which the protagonist Jane’s life, a novelist, sways. Race is one; so are marriage, parenting, money, and art, and above all the soul-crushing yet alluring realities of a writer’s life in Los Angeles.
This intimate exploration of an artist’s struggles, dreams, and struggles in the shadow of the Hollywood dream factory perfectly complements Senna’s work. She is a critically acclaimed novelist whose parents were semi-famous writers (one a prolific poet, the other an editor) whose famously interracial marriage fell apart when she was five. In her first five books—three novels, one A tense but acclaimed family memoir and a collection of short stories — Senna is known for his thoughtful reflections on the experience of being black and biracial in America.
Turn that critical gaze back to the West Bank, Color TV is an uplifting yet poignant riff on the struggling artist as a wannabe middle-aged sellout. Jane is desperately trying to escape genteel poverty through her writing—first, by finishing her second novel, an unsellable centuries-long tale of mixed-race history that she’s been working on for a decade (a “War and Peace hybrid”), and turning that publication into a stake in her university teaching job.
When that fails, Jane embarks on a dangerous quest to become a television writer. This quest puts Jane in the orbit of Hampton Ford, a powerful and morally questionable producer. Fiercely ambitious and flamboyant, Ford is a mix of Kenya Barris (Black-ish) And Tyler Perry (Madea). Her mission was to create diverse content for the studio, which was struggling with diversity. Working with Ford put her at odds with her husband, Lenny, a painter and perfectionist pursuing a higher artistic calling. The show she pitched was simply a comedy about “mixed people.” Ford thought it could be “the greatest mixed-race comedy ever to hit the small screen… the Jackie Robinson of mixed-race comedies… Pinky meets—I don’t know— Modern Family. Imitation of life respond, as, Everyone loves Raymond“ .
All sorts of antics ensue. And it’s a wild ride. But throughout Color TVWhat stands out is the mastery of Senna’s writing, endlessly quotable and insightful, significant provocative language and metaphors, used flexibly. Human frailty and appearance are central themes, but some of her most interesting descriptions focus on physical settings, such as the house in which Jane’s family lives.
Unable to afford a place that is both safe and suitable for a family of two artists and their two young children—Ruby, 8, and Finn, 6—Jane and Lenny move from temporary housing to temporary housing, prioritizing access to good schools. Their latest job is house-sitting the architecturally odd but elegant home of Brett MacNamara, Jane’s close graduate school classmate. A former writer like Jane, he has become a successful screenwriter.
His house “sits on top of a mountain above the city, but the architect who designed it, sometime in the sixties, mysteriously decided to make the exterior a solid wooden semicircle, like a blind face. It’s only when you step into the jungle-like courtyard, where lizards slither across your path, that you discover that inside the semicircle, the house is all glass, staring into its own navel.” It’s a description that resonates in the setting throughout their time in the setting.
Those lines reflect the wandering eye of Jane, a class-conscious, disillusioned novelist desperately searching for the middle-class stability she lacked in her own childhood. Caught between her parents, whom she describes as “Huey Newton and Patty Hearst,” she is not the product of either. Generation of love as much as “Hate vs. the State of Virginia.” Much of what makes Color TV It is a fascinating journey in which we live and see the world through her quick, often petty, statements. Her views move from light to dark and from topic to topic as easily and efficiently as a wasp.
Senna delights in Jane’s unflinching gaze, her thoughts revealing more about Jane than the people she’s watching. Some of the most incisive readings are about skin color and class. At one point, “Jane and Lenny tease each other about their different kinds of Blackness. Jane says Lenny is Caviar Black, which she explains by quoting Steve Martin’s line in Bastardsaid he was born a rich black kid. Lenny said Jane was Little finger Black. As in “the kind of Black you can’t see unless you squint.” Their interactions were great. Ultimately, I wish I had seen and learned more about Lenny. Since we’re locked into Jane’s one-dimensional mind, we only get glimpses of what’s going on with him as she’s forced to focus on her marriage to save her family.
Jane’s meet-cute with her husband is a particularly striking moment. When Jane meets Lenny, she’s “about to turn thirty-three” and has nothing left to hold on to. After a decade in Brooklyn, dodging suitors and suitors, she longs to “settle down, have a couple of kids, live in the suburbs.” So she meets a psychic who foretells her that love is just around the corner. Then she meets Lenny at a party and it’s a hit. One second, Jane is deliberately and provocatively describing her work as writing “hybrid” novels. The next, Jane and Lenny’s girlfriend Lilith are locked in a verbal fight over a cute guy in a T-shirt and Vans. Lilith marks her territory by putting Jane down and showing Lenny excessive affection. That exchange isn’t the fun part; The insight comes from Jane’s inner monologue: “What does he see in her? Lilith is very thin, very frail, with pale, almost transparent skin and enormous blond hair. Is he a necromancer? Does he have an interest in corpses?”
More importantly, Jane thinks, “Why would a sane, educated black man choose to be with a woman like that in this century? Doesn’t he realize that once he marries a white person, he’ll never be able to talk incessantly about white people again?” And then comes the punchline: “Jane comes from a marriage like the one Lilith and Lenny are about to enter—ebony and ivory, at odds with each other—and yet… she can’t stand the sight of interracial love. She can, but not when the man is black and the woman is white.” It’s quick but revealing. In those few paragraphs are racial and gender dynamics that we could parse for hours. Now imagine an entire novel filled with those quiet parts spoken aloud. That’s Color TV.
Voices May Shake Some Sensitivities — Race Talk Escalates in Old-School Way Chappelle’s Show at its peak or cartoon Boondocks Area. It’s a high bar. Senna’s brash satire deftly explores and explodes the psychology, not just the group chat, of a woman trying to navigate family, work, and race in post-apartheid America.
