December 3, 2024

COLOURED TELEVISION, by Danzy Senna

TOO REAL is my main criticism of recent publishing satires like YELLOWFACE and now Danzy Senna’s COLOURED TELEVISION, just because it’s personal, strikes close the bone, offering a terrifying glimpse into the parts of my psyche I’d prefer not to look at. Apart from the trauma of that, however, I really liked this novel, even through witnessing its main character’s descent into disaster made me want to yell at the page, “Don’t do it.” COLOURED TELEVISION is a novel about race and class in America, about academia, about Hollywood, and marriage, and parenthood, and precarity, and about everything—possibly to a fault, but by design. After taking ten years of complete her magnum opus, a novel her artist husband has nicknamed “the Mulatto War & Peace,” Jane Gibson reconsiders the many life choices that has kept her family from reaching the middle class stability she longed for in her bohemian childhood. They’re currently spending a year house-sitting for a friend in the Hollywood Hills, and Jane’s been hoping selling her novel will finally turn their fortunes around. When this fails to transpire, she tells some fibs and steals a friend’s idea, hoping to pull off the plot twist and happy ending she’s been waiting for. Unsurprisingly, things do not go well. But they’re biting and funny and the book has real heart.