Book review Danzy Senna Colored Television

 

 

 

 

Danzy Senna, Colored Television

The title is a clever play on words as the book is about the fate of Mulatto’s in the world of commercial Television i.e. they are neither black or white, brown or white, or oriental or white. They cannot pitch their tents comfortably in either polarity.  The ambiguities of race, sex, education, and social class are all put into a blender and out comes this novel that takes aim at  the futility of serious art and education when pitted against the nasty business of popular TV.  

There are some nice observational nuggets along the way. e.g. “One of the strange parts of being a teacher was how it made time stand still. If you didn’t look in a mirror, you could trick yourself into thinking that time wasn’t passing because your students kept staying young year after year.”  

The main character is Jane, an untenured adjunct English and writing professor at a Los Angeles college. She has published one semi-successful novel and is now married to an African American abstract painter who has not sold a single canvas. Jane is bi-racial and they have two small children who are also mulattos. The family is swamped with credit card debt and barely eking out an existence while she tries to finish a second novel that she hopes will make her a literary name and gain her tenure.  A further complication puts the value of the artistic life to a somber test. Jane’s sees her good friend Bret, a black man who has made millions writing popular TV programs about zombies, as someone who gave up his “promise of glory and immortality to spout drivel in that “land where original ideas come to die.” She was and still wonders whether she married the wrong man.   

Bret goes on a year-long trip to Australia to develop a new show and allows Jane and her husband Lenny to live rent free in his fancy hillside Los Angeles home in his absence.  Lenny can paint and Jane can work on her magnum opus—the major novel that her husband has dubbed her “Muletto War and Peace.  She finally finishes the novel, but her agent says it is unpublishable and the free house comes to an end when Bret, the owner, comes back early.

With two difficult children and a husband who has never sold a painting, Jane finally jumps at what looks like a chance to break into commercial television. She finds another successful black producer and pitches a TV series that will humorously explore the difficult world of Mulatto life.  Will it save the family bacon?  You will have to read it to see.

The book has sardonic humor, a bitter-sweet conclusion, and characters who keep you turning the pages. Most mortals suffer from fame deficiency. Anyone who has dreamed of making it big in art without selling out to popular culture will find something to hang on to here.  It’s not War and Peace, but it is worth a shot.    

I give it a 4 out of 5