How does a critic discuss novelist Danzy Senna? Contemporary marginalized authors have by and large avoided the explicit DEI slur hurled at everyone from university presidents to air traffic controllers, but society’s conversations around race haven’t gotten more sophisticated, and much of the marketing around non-white artists has remained one-dimensional. Cycling through the perception gaps that afflict this most shockingly underrated novelist feels like acting out the parameters of her oeuvre.
If Senna were Black, she would likely be credited with “going there” in regard to her ruthless and full-throated critiques of whiteness—its ability to be aloof and suffocating simultaneously, how much space it takes to appease. If she were white, her cutting and sympathetic portraits of the Black bohemian class would probably get pushback for recounting experiences not her own, whereas the one-drop rule renders even biracial writers and artists Black by default. But because Senna is the daughter of a Black Mexican man and a white woman, she chooses to write from the less demarcated space of biracialism specifically—skewering the manners and mannerisms of both races. As a result, the intent of her work is easy to acknowledge as art but difficult to spin into today’s political righteousness. It’s almost as if the anxiety of erasure that has long been associated with mixed-race unions weakens the plentiful surface-level attractions of her novels. Come for protagonists whose very existences are charged with meaning; stay for curl types and R&B eras as Wharton-esque milieus.
The desire for money and the envy of those who have it reconcile competing racial interests in Colored Television, Senna’s latest. We meet Jane, a middle-aged writer with a racial background similar to Senna’s, and her Black painter husband, Lenny. Jane is intent on pole-vaulting the sophomore slump by making her second novel a sprawling historical epic on biracialism. Like most artists, both are teachers; Jane has the opportunity to obtain tenure if she finishes her novel on sabbatical, and Lenny, who jokingly calls Jane’s novel her “mulatto War and Peace,” will likely never get tenure because he’s into abstraction and therefore unable to capitalize on the art world’s obsession with Black figurative art. Financial instability and Jane’s class aspirations have led them to a long string of house-sitting gigs; the couple stay at the residences of much wealthier friends throughout Greater Los Angeles to keep their costs down. This unstable situation has rendered Ruby, the couple’s daughter, lonesome and escapist. (One of the funnier details in the novel is this child of serious artists roaming around in a blond Frozen wig.) But it has also left their son, Finn, imperiled, as he has been diagnosed with an unidentified neurological issue that reads as though he is on the spectrum. Attending to his needs costs money.
Every story requires an inciting incident, Jane thinks while working on her novel, regurgitating the mantras of her grizzled writing teacher from her MFA program. Here, that incident is her family’s stay at the house of Jane’s friend from grad school, Brett. He was the only other biracial person in her program—to say nothing of the nonexistent Black or other POC students. Unlike Jane, however, Brett soon abandoned fiction for TV writing, made tons of money working on zombie shows, and married a white person.
Drinking Brett’s vintage wine while wearing the much nicer clothes of Brett’s wife and watching her children play with the more expensive toys of Brett’s children ushers Jane into a full-blown midlife crisis. She hopes the success of her second novel will fix this, but her agent and editor reject the manuscript, telling her to give up on the biracial stuff, which sends her on an ill-fated foray into television writing. She uses her relationship with Brett to impose herself on his agent, who introduces her to Hampton Ford, the—there’s no way else to describe it—token Black content creator of the day.
Propelling this plot is some of the most poignant writing on the money problems of artists in the 21st century. Kay Franken, Jane’s colleague at her university who failed on her book-or-bust sabbatical year, is described as “living in her office, like a rodent” when Jane finds her on campus, listening to Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! in her pajamas. The Subaru Jane and Lenny share is always speckled with berries and bird shit, an image that contrasts with the Porsche that Hampton drives. Class commentary tessellates into tragedy when refracted through a multiracial lens. It has almost become a cliché that the minutiae of life don’t affect people of different ethnic backgrounds equally, but Senna’s impulse is to shuffle the deck. Bourgeois Blacks and impoverished biracials with aesthetic credentials somehow find themselves in the same room as white people with generational wealth. Discerning who is actually victimized is complicated.
Is Jane’s resentment of Lenny for not being a breadwinner warranted? Maybe, but if you said out loud that a Black person has it easier within the confines of cultural capital than a half-white person because they have their identity all figured out, someone would probably call you a racist. Meanwhile, Hampton’s ruthlessness in getting “diverse programming” on air might be justified in light of his singular position, but it could also be a projection of his own fears of erasure as the father of a daughter who could pass for white.
Then there is Jane herself, who is so maniacal about pulling herself out of poverty that she is willing to traffic in her “mulatto” identity for art while simultaneously being so unsure of it in her real life that, at 46 years old, she remains uncomfortable presenting as herself in public. “The makeup had not fixed everything—it had not balanced out what was fundamentally asymmetrical about her face—but she looked okay, as blank and poreless and presentable as could be expected,” Jane thinks about herself on the way to her first meeting with Hampton. The image comes after meeting one of his assistants, Layla, a second-generation immigrant from Nigeria with “a perfect face.” Seeing Hampton in his casual uniform (“crisp white T-shirt…expensively torn jeans…bright high-tech sneakers”) makes Jane second-guess dressing to impress—only to feel shockingly underdressed at their next meeting, with Hampton’s boss, “a white man in a suit…with expensive red-framed glasses.” Bewilderment in the face of nonexistent dress codes provides comic relief and grants readers insight into Jane’s anxious psyche. More notable is the fact that her sense of self is reactive. She sees what other people are doing and feels an impulse to correct herself.
An ex-boyfriend who calls Jane a narcissist is definitely a jerk, but there is something about her writing-as-gravy-train ambition that, outside of its self-delusion, reeks of desperation. From Brett’s agent, Marianne, telling her about how many novelists are leaving the profession for a shot at a pilot to Hampton’s other assistant, Topher, hitching his dreams as a Yale-educated drama student to prestige television, the same crowded labor environment that afflicts publishing and the university is brought to bear on Jane’s scheme. But as with the bestseller list or the tenure track, artists of color are forced to hold on to the possibility that they will be the one to break through. A striver’s tenaciousness clashing with literature’s quiet dignity is the tension Colored Television feasts on. You should be rooting for Jane to sell her show idea, but watching her contort herself to fit into the small screen feels wrong.
Writers might accept becoming famous for their work, but you aren’t supposed to wish for that out loud. Anyway, mulatto is a slur—Jane’s usage simultaneously gestures toward her deflated self-esteem, America’s inability to discuss its racism constructively, and the latent superiority complexes of many of the novel’s single-race characters. (Lenny calling Jane “the last good mulatto” in the context of Brett’s “blending into the furniture” is one of many instances of the novel’s disparagingly comedic register.)
A flash-forward reveals that Jane and her family don’t go belly-up after all. A less skillful novelist would’ve tried to imbue the place they finally rent for themselves in a retirement community with all sorts of heavy symbolism—multiculturalism’s salability out to pasture or Jane being forced to deal with her mortality head-on. But in Senna’s hands, the choice simply feels like life. One day you are a promising young artist with your whole career ahead of you, and the next day you are barely getting by.•
Join us on September 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Senna will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Porochista Khakpour to discuss Colored Television. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
