In This Fleet, Funny Novel, a Writer Makes Art and Sells Out in Hollywood

The heroine of Danzy Senna’s new book is a novelist envious of the material pleasures all around her in Hollywood. COLORED TELEVISION, by Danzy Senna Danzy Senna’s “Colored Television” is among the first major novels of 2024’s truncated fall book season — truncated because few publishers want to release a novel anywhere near the blast zone of the November election — but it feels more like a summer blockbuster. It’s about a struggling mixed-race couple in Los Angeles — she’s a writer, he’s a painter — and it has its dark corners. But it’s no knock to suggest that Senna has, in the way that a peripatetic filmmaker might display, while cracking her knuckles, shrewd commercial instincts. “Colored Television” is funny, foxy and fleet; it’s aspirational about money and luxury items and mocking of those aspirations. There are times, especially near the end, when you might wish Senna pushed deeper into the themes and the pain she lays bare, but the jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart. The popular novelist and the literary (whatever that means) novelist in her are like the two halves of a black-and-white cookie, which she adroitly crumbles. It will surprise no one who has followed Senna’s career to learn that her protagonist, Jane, is a biracial woman married to a Black man. Senna is the daughter of the poet and novelist Fanny Howe, who is white, and the writer and editor Carl Senna, who is Black. She herself is married to the writer Percival Everett, the author most recently of “James,” a reimagining of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Nearly everything Senna has written — three previous novels, a memoir, a book of stories — has been about mixed-race life in America. She makes you feel the joys, the discontents, the estrangements. Senna knows that we know this. The reader is in on the joke when Jane finally turns in the baggy monster of a second novel she’s been working for nearly a decade, a collagelike and “manspreading” American epic of biracial life — that has nearly destroyed her career and […]

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