Here, the tragic mulatto is circumstantial: the novel makes it clear that, given the right motivations, anyone is capable of desiring badly, especially when custom furniture is on the line.
In the beginning of Danzy Senna’s sixth novel, Colored Television, Jane Gibson, the protagonist, is driving around an elegant Los Angeles neighborhood. She cannot help but peer through the windows of sexy, expensive, sprawling homes in the hopes to try and get a good look inside. She has no shame in admitting that she is desperate to pass as the kind of person who has such a beautiful, glamorous life. And like most of Danzy Senna’s characters, Jane is transfixed with the idea of being seen as a success—or, in other words, happy, rich, and Black. These seemingly straightforward identities are part of why Jane is always doomed to come up short. But who exactly is the real Jane? A novelist? A syndicated television writer? An attentive wife and doting mother? She can’t quite say for sure, and in an age of distorted reflections how exactly does one see the truth? Jane’s answer? Make it worse. This is Jane’s signature advice to her creative writing students. Colored Television heeds this advice with characters who are bad biracial protagonists who write bad novels and even worse television pilots. They are nesting dolls of artifice, unending despair, and relentless ambition made worse by a city notorious for having two faces and a charm that never quite surfaces. It is a familiar terror of sorts.
This is well-trodden territory for Senna who published six previous novels, including her 1998 breakout debut novel, Caucasia about two mixed-race girls growing up in 1970s New England. Born and raised on the East Coast to a black mother and white father, Senna is in some way constantly thinking about the shifting tides of biracial experiences, their meaning, and the way each generation must choose where exactly these stories fit in the culture. Known for her wit and critical eye towards color and class, Colored Television is Senna’s most recent and acerbic take on the situation yet. In it, Jane, a struggling mixed-race author living in the post-Obama era, seeks to find a place in the television industry after her agent and editor reject her second novel, a 150,000 word magnum opus on the history of the mulatto. What makes this task so tedious and thus a classic Senna novel is the fact that Jane is trapped between wanting to be a writer who writes about mixed identity and invents the great biracial American Novel while resenting an industry that exploits her identity and ambition to do so for its own gain. This ongoing tension becomes the problem that unravels the rest of Jane’s life, serving as a reminder that the search for authenticity in one area of life will always mean extracting it from another.
Like every novelist, Jane is burdened, overworked, and overlooked. She is full of ideas but has nowhere to put them. She is keeping afloat in the worst part of the California housing crisis and mothering two children, one of whom is high on the autism spectrum. Lenny, her artist husband, cannot sell a painting no matter how much his life depends on it. “You would never know the artist is black,” is a common criticism he receives given he paints in abstract strokes devoid of any larger connection or resemblance to race. And so they carry on moving from here to there and back again under the sunny Los Angeles skies just as any struggling artistic couple is wont to do. That is until they suddenly come up on their luck when a yearlong house-sitting stint for a screenwriter friend in the prime center of Hollywood finally gives Jane space to finish her novel: “A tomb-like escapade of mulattos dashing and absconding from century to century.” This is her magnum opus, the thing she has been primed to make all her career and should be a smashing success, but like the rest of Jane’s life, this too turns out to be a problem. The content is a disappointment to her publisher who wants her to “expand her territory beyond race.” It’s a strange request considering that Jane is responding to what the publishing market has wanted from her, and if Jane can’t be the one to write thoughtfully about racial identity, who can? The answer lies in the gimmick, and so begins the painful grift to get the industry to accept her work without actually accepting her ideals.
Determined to get the kind of money and security everyone else is chasing, Jane will do anything to sell one of her ideas. She lands in the clutches of Hampton Ford, a big-time producer for one of television’s busiest networks. Hampton has the connections to make anyone successful and has taken an interest in Jane’s work. The network has given Hampton space to do whatever he wants in the hopes of replicating the success of his previous silly and ridiculous racial family comedies. “The mulatto in America is where the money’s at,” Hampton exclaims to Jane during one of their development meetings. It is a dubious proclamation, but one that Jane has no choice but to go on believing, given that her publishing career may very well be over and she is desperate to help her family settle down. Creating a syndicated television show seems like her ticket to stable housing and maybe, finally, a glamorous West Coast lifestyle. But working with Hampton proves treacherous, turning Jane’s television dreams into a darker, distant fantasy.
Colored Television aims to make the idea of the tragic mulatto new again, or, perhaps, to assert that it has never really left us. That Jane is always surveying her new foreign environment with near x-ray acuity, taking apart and reassembling the racial identities around her like a field rifle, is because she hopes to better understand what she has to either pick up or leave behind to get closer to the center of things. Here, the tragic mulatto is circumstantial: the novel makes it clear that, given the right motivations, anyone is capable of desiring badly, especially when custom furniture is on the line. Jane should have a better sense of self by now, and the fact that she doesn’t makes the work all the more readable. She is the daughter of a theory-minded generation, where race is both too fluid and too real, and where no one actually wants to be understood, only verified. Between having job security as unstable as the ozone layer and a penchant obsession with the history of the mixed-race, Jane is an insufferable and somewhat of a designed-to-fail Temu-brand imitation of Danzy Senna herself. Lamenting about the poor reading skills her creative writing students possess (“They didn’t like big, sprawling old-fashioned novels. Their brains had not evolved for that kind of reading experience.”) and gripes about the Kardashian bloodline (“Stormi, she’s going to be the most normal one”), Senna has given her beige replica the annoying and yet utterly reasonable maladies of the Los Angeles novelist-turned-professor. Jane’s existence and her chaotic environment seem to be written as a kind of smoke flair signaling just how batshit crazy it is to be alive right now: “intuitive psychodynamic counselor with a specialty in racial alchemy,” is a description of a regular dinner party guest and also quite the string of words. It is the present and future buckling under the weight of representation. It is a spectacular free-falling of dominoes, and it is funny because it is true. Yet this is Jane’s life, and its distinctly mundane yet dystopian attributes might be ours too. What to do with this recognition?
Senna thinks we might as well embrace it. And yet, she is after something else in writing such outlandish and, more importantly, familiar depictions; specifically, how much we cling to our hyper-specific identities as a way of being understood. If every part of ourselves can be squeezed out into pithy and handcrafted adjectives then we will have minimized the ability for anyone to ever misread us. Senna knows we are aware of this fear and grafts this awareness onto Lenny who in turn abhors the cultural “belly rubbing music” of the seventies and eighties with its insufferable synthesizers and its proclamations of black love and power. His actions are a stand-in for the equally annoying and overly paranoid liberal, but his attitude as the novel’s free-spirited lethargic genius is one of the novel’s most affecting bits in what otherwise is prose designed to sag and stall in the way all conversations about race and identity inevitably do. “Together they still hated so much,” is how Jane describes their tethered connection to each other, and it is this shared loathing for most of life’s happenings that also makes them a delicate pair—a couple of plates balancing on sticks in the air—and it is this mutual unsteadiness and chaos that portrays them best.
It would be easy to call Colored Television a satire, but that would miss the point. Satire implies distance; Senna offers none. Instead, what Senna seems to be after is to ask us what, exactly, makes someone authentic? It is a question that saturates even the most mundane details of the novel as a paranoid Jane is racked with anxiety while she cuts into her daughter’s birthday cake. “Jane set the cake down on the table in front of Ruby. It was a cheap cake from Baskin-Robbins, Frozen themed. She worried it was a tell that this house, even this shirt, didn’t belong to her.” It is a good question and even a funny one when it is clear the novel relishes in the knowledge that taking one’s subject matter too seriously might mean it isn’t being taken seriously at all. Authenticity cannot come down to picking out the right sheet cake to serve a group of children until it can and every choice is a test of belonging. Or, in Hampton’s case, the anxiety plays out over years, fretting over just how many generations it will take until his descendants all look like “Abercrombie & Fitch motherfuckers for grandkids and some kind of Quincy Jones Christmas Extravaganza.” The cynical self-awareness on display is a dizzying act, but one I suspect is a declaration of how well you have to see and know your subject matter to get them so wrong.
But Jane Gibson was not the only one caught up in exploitation, and Colored Television was not the only novel this year intent on rethinking identity. In fact, one may be tempted to read parts of Colored Television as a twin of Percival Everett’s acclaimed novel, James, and for good reason. James, Everett’s latest Pulitzer Prize winning novel, revisits The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. In James we encounter the taciturn, shrewd, bibliophile Jim who has never really been the slave that history made him out to be: his motivations are not the stuff of historical American fiction but the raw anxieties of a fugitive genius. He thinks like a philosopher and acts like a fool because that is the only way to survive within a white world that insists on categorizing him. But here’s the crucial twist: James is in on the joke. Jane is not. Where the intimate and the authentic of Senna’s characters are revealed through artifice, James is actually recovered from this fate—a reversal that asserts that ambiguity is the most authentic identity. This is where both novels collide. Colored Television and James are both, in their own ways, novels about performance. But while Everett’s James retains agency through opacity, Senna’s Jane dissolves through exposure. James survives by being misread. Jane is destroyed by being read at all. They work as a great pair, and like the best bits arrive at the perfect time. Colored Television brings the setup: Are there any acts left after this black performance ends? James delivers the punchline: No, it is the whole show.
TJ Calhoun is an editor and writer who lives in Chicago.
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