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A Novel
by Danzy Senna
Book Reviewed by:A brilliant dark comedy about love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial- identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia.
Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane's sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her "mulatto War and Peace." Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.
But things don't work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a "real writer," and together they begin to develop "the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies." Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.
Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna's most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.
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...continued
Full Review
(1119 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
In Colored Television by Danzy Senna, Jane, a novelist turned aspiring TV writer from the East Coast, reflects on her inability to get used to the warm springs of Los Angeles while also considering their utility: "All that sunshine was said to be the reason the film industry had moved west back in the 1920s. Only in Los Angeles could they control when it rained and when it snowed. And the light here was, it was true, like no other light, perpetually effervescent, mirthful."
According to PBS, the industry did set up shop in Southern California at least partly for that reason. Movie production in its early days was more prevalent in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago, where unforeseen weather events could cause long delays in filming. There...
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I couldn't stop turning the pages, and only when it was all over did I realize what Senna had done. Addictive, hilarious and relatable, yes, but Colored Television is after something larger and more elusive, a very modern reckoning with the ambiguities triangulated by race, class, creativity and love. She nails it.
