Danzy Senna’s Colored Television Retreads Old Ground

Photo-Illustration: Vulture

Jane Gibson is already telling lies when she realizes that she’s suspected of telling a different one. The protagonist of Danzy Senna’s latest novel, Colored Television, has been sitting in a conference room with a big-shot TV guy named Hampton Ford, making him think she’s an accomplished writer and full professor who’s ready to quit books for TV — when in fact she’s a one-time novelist with a recently rejected second book and an untenured teaching gig. She’s pitching him on a series: “a comedy about a kooky but lovable mulatto family.” Mulatto is the term she prefers for herself. She’s ready to defend her idea. But Hampton, who’s Black, is busy studying her face. “What’s your numbers breakdown? Like, percentages?” he asks, peering at her. Then he goes further: “You got a family photo?”

Of course, Jane has one in her wallet. She’s so often mistaken for white that she lives in a state of vigilance, ready to throw down her bona fides. Although she never says so directly, we sense that, for her, being seen the wrong way reopens a wound — and that’s why, Senna writes, people like her keep family photos at hand, “like yellow stars.”

This is not Senna’s first whirl with mixed-race neurosis. (For some of us, it’s a lifelong project.) Colored Television is her fourth novel that follows a woman who looks and worries like Jane does. Jane is a typical Senna protagonist in that she’s a light-skinned, mixed-race Black woman who has to work hard to be seen by others the way she sees herself. The Senna woman is a little lost, a little angry, and, more often than not, a liar. In her fiction, Senna uses lies like starting fluid: These plots aren’t moving until the main character starts deceiving.

In Colored Television, the lies begin with the rejection of Jane’s book. Insecure and status-conscious, Jane neuters her world by slotting everyone she meets into types, especially the people she envies. She and her husband, Lenny, call the game “Forensics”: Hampton’s beautiful assistant? She’s nothing but a Nigerian American Princess. Jane’s rich showrunner friend Brett is mixed like Jane but belongs to the “Tiger Woods school of cluelessness.” For Jane, the worst thing you can be is “deracinated,” a word that appears in this book more times than you’d think. The best thing you can be is a wealthy Black artist. She and Lenny are cosplaying as the latter when the story opens; they and their two young kids are house-sitting for Brett, who’s on a monthslong trip to Australia. Maxed-out credit cards aside, things are going okay for the family — especially because Jane is finally completing the epic sophomore novel she’s spent a decade writing. Lenny calls it her “mulatto War and Peace.” Jane thinks it could be her magnum opus. Sadly, both her agent and editor disagree. When they tell her the book is no good, Jane gets so depressed she decides to sell out. She bluffs her way into a meeting with Brett’s TV agent and begins to claw her way into the biz, all while pretending to Lenny that she’s only taking meetings for “research.” She’s lying so hard she doesn’t even notice that she’s being conned too.

Senna first explored the lying life in her 1998 debut Caucasia, which is set in the 1970s and loosely (very loosely) inspired by her own childhood growing up in Boston. In Caucasia, the young protagonist, Birdie Lee, lies because she has no choice: After her civil-rights-activist parents stumble into hot water, her Black father takes off with her darker-skinned sister while her white mother pushes pale-skinned Birdie underground. On the run, Birdie is forced to pass as white — a major trauma after spending years being taught to be proud of her Blackness. Senna shows us that the pain is so much bigger than the miscategorization. It’s about the loss of her father and sister, and her loss of faith in her parents’ judgment. The world of the book is so exact that you never doubt the stakes. The personal and political hang together in a tight and satisfying braid.

Not so in Colored Television, a book that wants to be satire but can’t decide what world it’s living in. This is a new problem for Senna. Although the plot of her last novel, 2017’s New People, often felt like it was spinning out of its author’s control, it was precise about the moment it depicted. Senna set the book in the ’90s and took shots at the Brooklyn community she was once part of, depicting it as a self-righteous, multiculti, Fort Greene fantasy. Her protagonist, a light-skinned 20-something, becomes obsessed with a darker-skinned poet she meets in part because he signifies the old-school Blackness she grew up idealizing. Colored Television is much more confused about who its enemies are. With only brief nods at broader anti-Blackness — which is mostly noted by Lenny, who yearns to leave the U.S. for this reason — the novel takes for granted Jane’s belief that biracial Black people suffer a special marginalization.

As if to prove what Jane is up against, Senna scatters the book with passages from a racist 1950s sociological study that Jane consults: “What a tortured figure we find in the American mulatto!” crows its white author, who declares that this figure “forever remains an unknowable creature, indescribable, doubtful, mysterious, and unclean.” These bits never quite connect to the present day of the novel, which presents real estate and cultural products as the best ways to measure status. Its assessments feel strangely out of time. While Jane’s telling Hampton Ford, “Mulattos are like the queer people of races. Like gay characters, you might have noticed, who always kill themselves in movies. So do mulattos,” you might be racking your brain to think of a single recent movie that did this. The hyperbole lands sideways at a time when an epidemic of cynical box-ticking means every power center in the country is eager to promote (light-skinned, well-behaved) people of color as a way to have their DEI cake and eat it racistly too. Truly, there’s never been a better time to be white-ish. One would assume Senna knows this. She hasn’t seemed afraid of implicating herself before. Back in 1998, in an essay for Slate titled “Mulatto millennium,” she wrote: “Pure breeds (at least the black ones) are out and hybridity is in.” Colored Television, by comparison, reads like a treatise on Why Representation Matters.

Who cares, though, if the main character’s annoying or self-serving or wrong? It doesn’t matter if we like her so long as the trip’s a gas. Sometimes Senna remembers this. The best scenes are the ones in which Jane is spitballing with Hampton Ford, yanking out gonzo plotlines — what if, uh, the characters start a rent-a-Black-friend service? — and fielding his rants about the biracial Kardashian kids. In Hampton, a lightly tortured Kenya Barris type, Senna finds a strong vehicle for her obsessions: Married to a Black woman, he can’t get over the fact that their daughter came out a freckle-faced redhead. On the other side is Jane’s husband, Lenny, the book’s moral compass. Skeptical of status seekers and obsessed with his work (and resembling not a little Senna’s real-life husband, fellow writer Percival Everett), he is possibly the only person Jane respects. And he loves her, too, makes room for her; he acquiesces to the house-sitting gig for Brett because he hopes it will make her happy. “Jane hadn’t been about to miss out on an opportunity to pretend they were rich Black artists who lived in the hills,” writes Senna. “She had been determined to be that couple this year. She wanted it, and Lenny knew how badly she wanted it.”

The book sputters because Senna can’t decide how seriously she wants us to take it. All the ingredients for a romp are there, from the blinkered heroine to the delicious possibilities of brain-dead Hollywood pitchspeak. Colored Television still manages to never really get that fun. Senna puts too much shoulder into justifying Jane, waving back at the character’s lonely earlier years and her trauma from childhood, which she spent torn between broke and acrimonious bohemian parents. In a scene where Jane deals with her daughter’s disappointment over a birthday gift, Senna writes of Jane’s own life, “She too had parents who were overeducated and underpaid — it was the worst combination … They had picked poetry over profit.” We’re meant to understand that Jane’s doomed to repeat this, even if we’re thinking “doomed” is too strong a word. Her biggest fear seems to be that her kids will have to go to a not-fancy-enough public school.

There’s a reason Jane’s pitches are compelling: Senna is great at coming up with concepts. The only problem is she doesn’t know where to take them. New People ends in baffling escalation. Colored Television ends with a happily-ever-after coda. As the action plateaus, and the lies taper off, Jane’s comedown to reality is a comedown for the reader, too. Although Senna’s got plenty of scorn — for the publishing industry, for Hollywood, for bougie white Angeleno mothers — it’s scattered too widely to make a point. The novel ends up reading like an extended stress dream. When Jane’s agent and editor reject her novel, the agent gives this rationale: “We both feel you’re doing yourself a disfavor by writing about race again — by writing about, you know, the whole mixed-race thing.” And yet here we are, reading another Senna novel about the whole mixed-race thing. It’s enough to make this neurotic mixed-race writer play a little Forensics of her own: Jane sounds a lot like a less successful Danzy Senna.