Photo illustration: Vulture
Jane Gibson is already telling a lie when she realizes that she is suspected of telling another one. The protagonist of Danzy Senna’s latest novel, Color televisionsits in a conference room with a big-time TV guy named Hampton Ford and makes him believe she’s an accomplished writer and tenured professor ready to give up making books for TV – when in fact she’s a former novelist whose second book was recently rejected and a tenured teaching job. She proposes a series to him: “A comedy about a wacky but lovable mulatto family.” Mulatto is the term she prefers to use for herself. She’s ready to defend her idea. But Hampton, who is black, is busy studying her face. “What do your numbers look like? In percentages, say?” he asks, looking at her. Then he goes on: “Do you have a family photo?”
Of course Jane has one in her wallet. She is so often mistaken for white that she is constantly on guard, ready to abandon her credibility. Although she never says it directly, we sense that it rips open a wound in her when she is seen the wrong way—and that is why, Senna writes, people like her keep family photos handy, “like yellow stars.”
This is not Senna’s first battle with mongrel neurosis. (For some of us, it’s a life project.) Color television is her fourth novel that follows a woman who looks and worries like Jane. Jane is a typical Senna protagonist in that she is a light-skinned, biracial 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 novels, Senna uses lies like starting fluid: these plots only get going when the main character starts deceiving.
In Color televisionthe lies begin with the rejection of Jane’s book. Insecure and status-conscious, Jane neuters her world by categorizing 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 more than a Nigerian-American princess. Jane’s rich showrunner boyfriend, Brett, is mixed like Jane but belongs to the “Tiger Woods school of cluelessness.” For Jane, the worst thing you can be is “uprooted,” a word that appears more often than you’d think in this book. The best thing you can be is a rich black artist. She and Lenny disguise themselves as the latter as the story begins; she and their two young children are house-sitting for Brett, who is on a months-long trip to Australia. Aside from maxed-out credit cards, things are going well for the family—especially because Jane is finally finishing the epic novel she’s been writing for a decade for her second book, which Lenny calls her “mulatto novel.” War and Peace.” Jane thinks it could be her masterpiece. Unfortunately, her agent and editor disagree. When they tell her the book is no good, Jane becomes so depressed that she decides to sell it. She tricks her way into a meeting with Brett’s TV agent and begins to learn the business, while telling Lenny that she is only attending meetings for “research.” She lies so persistently that she doesn’t even realize that she is being deceived, too.
Senna first explored the life of lies in her 1998 debut Caucasusset in the 1970s and loosely (very loosely) inspired by her own childhood in Boston. In Caucasusthe young protagonist Birdie Lee lies because she has no other choice: after her parents, who are civil rights activists, get into trouble, her black father runs off with her dark-skinned sister, while her white mother pushes the light-skinned Birdie underground. On the run, Birdie is forced to pretend to be white – a major trauma after years of being taught to be proud of her blackness. Senna shows us that the pain is much greater than the miscategorization. It is about the loss of her father and sister and her loss of trust in her parents’ judgment. The world of the book is so precise that you never doubt what is at stake. The personal and the political are intertwined in a tight and satisfying web.
Not so in Colour televisiona book that wants to be satire but cannot decide in which world it is set. This is a new problem for Senna. Although the plot of her last novel, “The Journey to Rome” from 2017, New peopleoften seemed to be slipping out of the author’s control, it was precise about the moment it depicted. Senna set the book in the ’90s and poked fun at the Brooklyn community she once belonged to, portraying it as a self-righteous, multicultural Fort Greene fantasy. Her protagonist, a light-skinned twenty-something, becomes obsessed with a darker-skinned poet she meets, in part because he embodies the old-fashioned blackness she idealized as a child. Colour television is much more unclear about who his enemies are. With only brief allusions to a more general anti-black attitude—noted especially by Lenny, who longs to leave the United States because of it—the novel takes for granted Jane’s belief that mixed-race black people face particular marginalization.
As if to prove what Jane is up against, Senna peppers the book with passages from a racist sociological study from the 1950s that Jane consults: “What a tortured figure is the American mulatto!” crows the white author, explaining that this figure “remains forever an inscrutable being, indescribable, doubtful, mysterious and impure.” These passages never really relate to the present of the novel, which presents real estate and cultural products as the best ways to measure status. Its assessments seem oddly timeless. While Jane Hampton Ford says, “Mulattoes are like the queer people of their races. Like gay characters who always kill themselves in movies, as you may have noticed. Mulattoes do that too,” you might rack your brain to think of a single recent movie in which this has happened. This hyperbole backfires at a time when an epidemic of cynical complacency means every center of power in the country is hell-bent on promoting (light-skinned, well-mannered) people of color in order to grab the DEI pie while eating it racistly. There’s really never been a better time to be white. You’d think Senna knows that. She hasn’t seemed afraid to drag herself into the issue so far. Back in 1998, in an essay for Slate titled “Mulatto Millennium,” she wrote, “Purebreds (at least the black ones) are out and hybridity is in.” Colour televisionIn comparison, it reads like a treatise on “Why Representation Matters.”
But who cares if the main character is annoying, self-serving or wrong? It doesn’t matter if we like them, as long as the ride is fun. Sometimes Senna remembers that. The best scenes are the ones where Jane speculates about Hampton Ford, spouts gonzo plot lines—what if the characters started a black-friend-hire service?—and fends off his rants about the biracial Kardashian kids. In Hampton, a slightly tormented Kenya Barris type, Senna finds a powerful vehicle for her obsessions: He’s married to a black woman and can’t get over the fact that their daughter was born a freckled 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 not a little like Senna’s real-life husband, fellow writer Percival Everett). He may be the only person Jane respects. And he loves her too, makes room for her; he agrees to the house-sitting job for Brett because he hopes it will make her happy. “Jane wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to pretend they were rich black artists living in the mountains,” Senna writes. “She was determined to be that couple this year. She wanted it, and Lenny knew how much she wanted it.”
The book stutters because Senna can’t decide how seriously she wants us to take her. All the ingredients for a fun adventure are there, from the narrow-minded heroine to the delicious possibilities of mindless Hollywood-speak. Colour television still manages to never really be that much fun. Senna puts too much emphasis on justifying Jane by drawing on the character’s lonely early years and her childhood trauma of being torn between broke and bitter-bohemian parents. In a scene where Jane is coping with her daughter’s disappointment over a birthday present, Senna writes of Jane’s own life: “She, too, had overqualified and underpaid parents – it was the worst combination… They had chosen poetry over profit.” We’re meant to understand that Jane is doomed to repeat this, even if we think “doomed” is too strong a word. Her greatest fear seems to be that her children will have to go to a not-so-fancy public school.
There’s a reason Jane’s pitches are so compelling: Senna is great at coming up with concepts. The only problem is that she doesn’t know how to execute them. New people ends in a confusing escalation. Colour television ends with a happy ending. As the plot dies down and the lies wear off, Jane’s relapse into reality is also a relapse for the reader. Although Senna attracts a lot of scorn–from the publishing industry, from Hollywood, from stuffy white moms in Los Angeles–it’s too scattered to make sense. The novel ends up reading like an extended stress dream. When Jane’s agent and editor reject her novel, the agent’s justification is, “We both think you’re doing yourself a disservice by writing about race again–by, you know, writing about 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 author do her own little forensics: Jane sounds a lot like a less successful Danzy Senna.
