Danzy Senna is a risk-taker. Of all the many things I admire about her writing, this may be what I appreciate most. In her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, she ruthlessly unravels her father’s tangled self-mythologies, even though they remain elusive in the end. In the novel New People (2017), she writes about a light-skinned mixed-race character named Maria (a “one-dropper,” Senna calls her) who is caught between two men and intent on her own enactment of self-annihilation; the book concludes in the middle, with the character having just broken into the apartment of one of the men, where she is now trapped, after his unexpected homecoming, underneath the bed. Senna’s is work that refuses to compromise or reassure us, that means to be disquieting instead. Is there any doubt that this is the function of art, of literature, to break down our complacency and replace it with complicity, to show us our faces refracted through characters about whom we cannot help but feel unresolved?
Jane, the protagonist of Senna’s new novel, Colored Television, is one more such figure. A writer struggling to finish her second novel, a professor striving for tenure, she exists in an almost entirely liminal space. She and her husband—an abstract painter—are perpetual house sitters, relying on the kindness of others to secure temporary lodgings for themselves and their two kids. As the narrative opens, the family is in a Los Angeles aerie owned by a graduate school friend now successful in Hollywood.
Like Maria, Jane is mixed-race; this is the subject of her novel. “It was,” Senna writes, “all about her people—the mulatto people—whose story, she explained, had been told up until now as a tragedy. The mulatto had been depicted on the one hand as dangerously sexual, like the half-crazed mulatta harlot in The Birth of a Nation or the quadroon rapist Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August. Or they were portrayed as sad and mopey, doomed to a life betwixt and between.”
Here, we get a glimpse of Senna’s method, which is to stir it up and throw everything against the wall. It’s exhilarating, thrilling, not least because in Jane we see the older if not wiser character Maria might have become. Jane’s book—“her mulatto War and Peace”—is problematic. Tenure feels like a con; television writing, to which she gravitates (hence the title of the novel), like another one. Meanwhile, her son, Finn, claims to have come from another planet. Her daughter, Ruby, says of the guests asked to her birthday party, “Those aren’t my friends. Those are just girls you invited. I don’t know any of them.”
Can you say living in extremis? That’s the not-so-quietly-desperate place where Jane resides. Suspended between responsibility and aspiration, in a world that not only doesn’t care but also cannot even recognize her, she does what she feels she must. That this involves mistakes, deception, and bad faith is entirely the point. What do we do when we are neither here nor there? How do we find a way? In Colored Television, Senna continues to ask these necessary questions, while never letting any of us—herself, her characters, or her readers—off the hook.•
