Every other country’s caste system always seems more absurd than one’s own. At home, where we are steeped in a culture that transmutes its codes, the directives of caste can feel so ubiquitous that they can be mistaken for logic. Elsewhere, it’s simply absurd. There are so many colors in Brazil’s population, for instance, that the Portuguese Language Museum once dedicated an entire room to the dozens of descriptives Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado uses in his novels to identify the skin tones of his various characters, from “green” and “blue” to “cinnamon.” And of course, social apartheid exists there today, very much of it based on ideas about color.
All these skin colors and more exist within America, too, and because whiteness seems to swirl in perpetual peril, the minute someone in America identifies as biracial, especially Black and white, an entire mythology boots up. One of this mythology’s central strains is the well-worn trope of the “tragic mulatto,” a piece of cultural coding that surfaces and emerges in literature about characters who are Black and white, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, characters who seek acceptance in the white world only to be thwarted and brought down by the discovery of—or character of—their Blackness.
How many directions this briefly sketched trajectory skips. For what if a fictive biracial woman were to turn to her Black ancestors? What if Blackness were, in fact, a source of strength? More importantly, what if, instead of seeking acceptance from a white establishment, it was a burgeoning Black institutional culture—even if it is tied to white funding—where her worth or existence needed verification? Danzy Senna has spent her career as a writer sapping the unsleeping bombs of racial tropes, and in her explosive, hilarious new book, Colored Television, she allows for these land mines as she rewrites racial comedy, and says a few things about class, too.
Jane, the book’s heroine, is a struggling novelist and professor, mother of two, daughter of a mixed New England marriage who grew up in boho poverty. Her precarious childhood seeded a deep longing within her for stability, and her formative years in front of the television have made her particularly swoonful to the images of Black opulence filling up the big screen and the little one on her Instagram feed. It hasn’t helped that, living in Los Angeles with her Black artist husband, Lenny, who makes no money selling his abstract paintings, everyday things—a house, a car, air, light, shade—cost far more than a novelist makes, even one with tenure, which Jane doesn’t have at the moment.
What Janes does have is a sabbatical and rich friends. How wise this book is about the fickle vibes of rich friends. Their extravagant gestures can sweep enormous change into a family like Lenny and Jane’s, lifting them up to a higher shore, and just as easily and abruptly retract these gifts, yanking them back out to financial sea. The entirety of Colored Television takes place during one such tidal window, as the couple and their two kids, Ruby and Finn, move to the Hollywood Hills into the architecturally significant home of Jane’s vastly successful writing school friend Brett, also biracial, who has made a small fortune writing and showrunning zombie series.
Lenny and Jane, who are from different social classes, respond in contrasting ways to their new, borrowed life. Lenny, the child of Black professionals, who has a secret love of tennis and an ability to code-switch into country club manners, sets up his studio and keeps painting. Jane claims Brett’s outdoor writing lab and begins to spiral. Her overdue and out-of-control novel, a kind of unified field theory of what she calls the mulattoes, spanning the Melungeons of Appalachia to well-known TV figures, suddenly seems like the Frankenstein monster it is. Even as she works, she is drowning in self-doubt.
Writing is not the only perilous part of this “new” life. Stepping into social life should have come with a hazard sign—not for their kids but for Jane. In simple activities, like taking their kids to playdates, Jane confronts a barrage of social signifiers, all of which Senna skewers better than just about any novelist working on the West Coast. The strollers that look like Volvos; the brittleness of white middle-age women in their adopted neighborhood. “Women who had not made enough money to send their kids to private school but who made just enough to live in this neighborhood with the blue ribbon public school.”
Everything costs more. Rather than confront this, Jane evades it, pretending the house is hers, that the life she has essentially slipped on like one of the muumuus in Brett’s wife’s closet isn’t on loan but nearly part of her skin. Colored Television paces the escalation of these lies brilliantly: how one fib makes another bald-faced one more possible. When Jane’s agent and an editor turn down her novel, it becomes easy to let Lenny think otherwise. This is, as they might say in television, the inciting incident. Her willingness to forestall acceptance of her failure produces an even balder lie or betrayal.
Betrayal is probably the better word, because one night, chatting with Brett, lying about the state of her novel, Jane learns that he might like finally to write about growing up biracial. Jane, annoyed, since he’d always avoided the subject before, decides she’s going to also borrow this idea and pitches it to Brett’s TV agent, whose business card lies on his desk. In contrast to the decade Jane had spent waiting on her novel, Jane wakes to an email in the morning and a request for a meeting. Just like that, her fortune begins to turn, and all it took was betraying her art and her friend and lying to her husband about it.
In her debut novel, Caucasia, published 26 years ago now, Senna narrated this constant push and pull from a child’s-eye perspective. It was not that her protagonist had to choose to be white or Black, to turn her back on one or the other, but rather that she was constantly observing a set of instructions—as if she only needed to know what to do. “In those years, I felt myself to be incomplete,” Senna wrote back then—“a gray blur, a body in motion, forever galloping toward completion—half a girl, half-caste, half-mast, and half-baked, not quite ready for consumption.”
In her subsequent novels and one memoir, Senna has explored the ways that biracial Americans are often expected to narrate that evolution, often to undo the supposed lie of Black and white races intertwining. As if to say, How could people of different shades be together? How could love and impression be so...intimate? “When there is a gap—between your face and your race, between the baby and the mother,” she wrote in the novel New People, “between your body and yourself—you are expected, everywhere you go, to explain the gap.”
At what point borrowing equals theft is one of the key moral questions that Colored Television revolves around, deepening the meaning of what is stolen, as in not offered. Talking to television producers in her meetings, Jane senses them fracking for emotional material. In meeting after meeting, she is so desperate that she serves up morsels of her life—scrambled, yes, but barely encoded, right there for all to see—for the form of entertainment.
This burlesque earns her a meeting with an enormously successful Black producer, Hampton Ford, who is fresh off the success of a show and has just inked a seven-figure development deal to provide more content. With his high-tech sneakers, expensive T-shirts, constant projected patter, and externalized thinking processes, Hampton is one of the best portraits of what a Hollywood producer is like up close, especially when their own reputations—however huge—hinge on the next deal.
Making Hampton’s task all the more stressful, for him and for her, is that it goes without saying that what he wants her to make is “Biracialism for Dummies.” The money man he needs to sell the show to is white, and many of the viewers he will have to win over are white, too. How Hampton talks to Jane has nothing to do with how the characters will be allowed to talk on the show.
To measure up to Hampton’s task, to provide a money man with a new idea, Jane becomes a veritable hurricane of ideas for episodes of a sitcom about a mixed-race family. As these pilot ideas grow more and more outlandish, it’s clear that what Jane will ultimately have to harvest is not her life, her dreams, scrambled-up versions of her fears and desires, but her sweat and blood. Her 10-year-in-the-making novel. It will need to get fed into the idea whirlpool, too.
Watching Jane feed all of the most meaningful aspects of her life into the ravenous “content” industry of Hollywood creates one of the best modern L.A. novels. The Hollywood writer story as soft zombie story. Bitten by the bug of aspirational culture, Jane can’t stop chasing what—even when she has it, if borrowed—is unattainable. It’s not acceptance that Jane wants. It’s the stuff. Looking into Brett’s glass-walled home, observing Lenny watching TV, her kids quietly playing, Jane should be wowed by the image. Instead, she fears loss. Skittering along the surfaces of scenes is a barely contained terror that she’ll never have what she wants.
Colored Television is a powerful portrait of what money does to a marriage when it works its way into the foundations like so much groundwater. At times, Jane understandably resents Lenny’s easy assumption that everything will be OK. His background made that feeling possible. Meanwhile, he watches her changing and starts raising the possibility that they move to Japan, what Jane calls “the witness protection program lifestyle that Lenny craved for them.” He wants to uproot the kids not just from Los Angeles but from America at large, and it’s hard to blame him. Were Jane not so astutely drawn as a character, it would be easy to pin their unraveling marriage on her for refusing.
For anyone who has ever felt the undertow of impostor syndrome, Colored Television may provide cold comfort. The reasons Jane can’t leave L.A., can’t stop giving ideas to Hampton until she’s given him everything, have to do with her desire to achieve something that is hers. She has spent a decade pumping her best ideas into teaching students. Nearly every pathway to her writing studio has been interrupted by something to do for the kids—something Lenny does, but not in an equal manner. It’s not that she wants it all, but Jane wants pleasure, she wants luxury, she wants relief.
Colored Television takes its title from the corny old Black TV shows Lenny and Jane used to watch when they were first together, when their kids were too young to have a diagnosis or the relief at not having one. Like the “belly-rubbing” R&B Jane likes to listen to, they’re a guilty pleasure, overwrought, outlandish, but real in that they acknowledge the ridiculousness of simply expressing oneself through a mask.
The saddest part of Colored Television is that the times Jane starts to feel most like she’s doing that is when she’s speaking to her husband. Intricately, the novel avoids in its plotting a question of who is at fault. Instead, as the stakes of Jane’s lies grow—the ones she tells to Lenny about her book, what she’s working on—simultaneously we are drawn into the deep inner narrative of Jane’s life, as seen in the images that bewitch her.
These can be humble tableaux, like the ones prompted by visiting an open house in Jane’s favorite neighborhood in the city. Subletting or house-sitting nomads, isn’t it time for her and Lenny to find a permanent home for their kids? Other images are highly specific. Almost comical. Later, during a camping trip to Joshua Tree to recapture the zest of their marriage, Jane looks up into the open desert sky and “felt like a white girl in a Mountain Dew commercial.”
These images storyboard Jane’s inner life in Colored Television. They are part advertising, part filmic set piece, and all of them have a form of subtle instruction. But one thing is hard to escape. “The thing about being a woman,” Jane concludes at one point, “a mother, a wife, was that if you wanted to be any more than those things you had to hire another wife…. Rich women got to pay somebody else to be them—a stunt double to make it look like they were doing everything well when, in fact, they were doing only the fun parts.”
The ways that envy, longing, and fury braid in Colored Television is so sophisticated, so raw, and so like a current that the novel makes an overwhelming case that only fiction gets us inside. Television may entertain. It may do so elegantly or with crude, brutal humor. But only the novel immerses like this, makes us feel submerged in the forces moving around Jane, tugging her this way and that. In the end, Jane has to make a decision—whether she’ll heed this latest call to represent her life or live it. She might be new at the game, but the TV writer in Jane knows what ending to give readers.•
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.
