Colored Television by Danzy Senna

 


Every time I think I'm done with contemporary "literary fiction," I break down and read a contemporary novel that turns out, against all expectations, to be good. Colored Television, by Danzy Senna, is one of them.

It is an account of a mixed-race—or to use the term that is very much at the center of the novel, "mulatto"—novelist, Jane Gibson, whose magnum opus, "a mulatto War and Peace," at which she's labored for ten years, is rejected by her agent and her editor. To make matters worse, if she can't publish the novel she will not get tenure at her teaching job. Her husband, an uncompromisingly unsuccessful painter, is no help. Because Jane is living with her family in Los Angeles—house-sitting, actually, in the architecturally important home of a screenwriter friend—opportunities to sell out present themselves, and she comes very close to doing so.

The novel is, among other things, a satire of bourgeois bohemian life, and the satire works. This is, reader, a "funny" novel that is actually funny in a sly and biting way. Senna's version of the city is recognizable, even to me, who grew up in LA, but hasn't lived there in a long time.

(This is the podcast interview with Senna that motivated me to read her book.)

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