BookBrowse Reviews Colored Television by Danzy Senna

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A struggling author tries to flip the script to go for a television career in this clever comedy about partnership, making art, and middle age.

In Danzy Senna's Colored Television, writing professor and author Jane reflects on the advice of Dennis Mulholland, the "literary dinosaur" in charge of her MFA program who she thought was "hokey, a hack, the way he liked to quote from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction." "The novel hinges on the inciting incident," she recalls him saying, "something to destabilize your character's life in the first thirty pages." Jane has tried to ignore this advice in her writing, but it has taken up residence in her mind and informed her teaching, somewhat against her will.

In Senna's novel, no clear "inciting incident" appears within the first thirty pages. Instead, we get a glimpse into Jane's background with her artist husband, Lenny, their financial struggles, and life with their children Ruby and Finn as they hop from one temporary home in the Los Angeles area to another. Currently, they've lucked into housesitting for Jane's old friend Brett while his family spends the school year in Australia. Brett attended the same MFA program Jane did, where the two of them bonded over being Black/white biracial. Since their workshop days, their paths have diverged in seemingly opposite directions. Brett has built wealth by writing for zombie television shows and married a white woman named Piper whom Jane doesn't respect, while Jane has clung to literary fiction and married Lenny, a Black abstract painter who takes stubborn pride in his own art as well as his wife's. Now Jane and Lenny, who can't imagine affording Brett's house themselves, can at least take advantage of the ample space for their work and drink his expensive wine, telling themselves at first that they'll replace the bottles and eventually just hoping he won't mind that they've depleted his collection.

But while no incident destabilizes Jane's life as early on as Mulholland suggests one should, the reader sees the one that will a mile away. She's inspired, in Brett's writing studio, to finally finish the second novel on which tenure at her job depends, a historical monster Lenny has dubbed her "mulatto War and Peace." We know novels portrayed like this, labyrinths of rabbit hole research, portend a writer has lost their way, and in real life are rarely indulged — that Jane is a middle-aged biracial woman with middle-aged biracial preoccupations makes this seem even less likely. Once it becomes clear that the book isn't a golden ticket to the stable suburban existence she wants for herself and her family, Jane, desperate, falls into another predictable turn. Like Brett, she decides, she will write for television. Hiding her novelistic failings from her husband and hoping to establish a new career before telling him anything, she sets off on this journey, making use of a contact of Brett's and a show idea he has for a biracial comedy that she's always thought would be terrible if he wrote it.

Some of the basic plot features of Colored Television echo another recent novel: Sarah Manguso's Liars, which also focuses on a writer with the anonymizing name Jane, an artist husband, and pitfalls inherent in a heterosexual partnership between creative types raising children. But unlike Jane's husband John in Manguso's novel, Lenny is, if anything, too supportive of his wife's work. More comfortable as a creator and a person than she is, he doesn't understand why she is suddenly ready to abandon her book, and he soon becomes suspicious of the "research" she's using as a guise for meeting with TV people. Jane has long been hiding her desires from him, letting him believe that she wants the same kind of adventurous, peripatetic existence that he does, when the truth is that she craves dependability and normalcy, maybe even more than a successful literary career.

Jane is an appealing lead — hapless and self-sabotaging but also scrappily capable in that she always gets what she wants in some form, necessary compromises and unforeseen consequences be damned — herself a television character of sorts you want to root for and warn of what's to come. One event plays out like a horror scene: At home alone with the children, she becomes aware that someone is in Brett's writing studio. Unable to think of who it might be, she heads towards the studio with the biggest knife she can lay hands on, all while failing to guess the most obvious explanation. She sees danger where none exists, but has trouble avoiding it when it comes right at her.

Senna's novel plays beautifully with notions of cliché. In satirizing obvious tropes, she both uses them for their originally intended purpose and invites the reader to question their validity. Jane's character arc follows the curve of a classic mid-life crisis, but instead of having an affair or indulging in the past, as middle-aged men are clichédly wont to do, she sneaks out of the house day and night with the aim of building a secret future. Her biracial identity and the lack of belonging it makes her feel is another cliché, but also a reality she must navigate, one that spins off into deeply hilarious explorations of anti-Black racism and its echoes, ranging from the sinister commodification of race in the entertainment industry to the psychic who once upon a time engineered Jane's relationship with Lenny, encouraging her to pursue him to save him from an unfulfulling life with a white woman: "You won't have to do much. He's miserable. He feels trapped in a Sesame Street episode…This is bigger than you and your silly heteronormative daydreams, Jane. This is about the universe."

Eager for momentum and validation, Jane wants to think that television is a lucrative medium of the future while a novel and tenure, aspirations she has spent decades laying the groundwork for, are useless milestones that will get her nowhere. In scenes that evoke secondhand embarrassment, she proclaims to new acquaintances that the novel is dead. This is arguably a more tired and worn-out concept than the novel itself has ever been, but it's so convincing for Jane, so easy for her to say to others and to herself, so cathartic for her to believe she can leave all her troubles behind. And it's so hard for her to believe in her literary work, even as Lenny unfailingly does, even as she's devoted her life to it. Jane's ideas can be convincing to the reader, too, but as the narrative winds on, one may begin to wonder about that mammoth abandoned manuscript on her desk. Despite its bloated, hackneyed appearance, despite the implications inherent in its role as a particular plot device, despite how it seems engineered to mock Jane as a character, can it really be so bad? Who knows? Maybe it's incredible.

This review first ran in the September 4, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.