Colored Television

Ever since her 1998 debut novel, Caucasia, made her a standout author of her generation, Danzy Senna has been known for interrogating the experiences of mixed-race people like herself. Twenty-six years later, her trenchant, self-aware, and darkly hilarious Colored Television follows a writer with similar preoccupations but less success. Though Jane aspires to bourgeois, Black bohemianism—a fantasy stoked by her long stint house-sitting with her family for an MFA classmate who sold out and went into TV—her ambitious, long-gestating new manuscript elicits only silence from her agent. So, lured by the siren call of a Hollywood paycheck, she becomes, unbeknownst to her principled artist husband, embroiled in a chaotic pilot-development process with a mercurial brand-name producer. As lies stack up and Jane’s desperation grows, Senna delivers a cutting satire of class anxiety, a vampiric entertainment industry, and the plight of literary novelists in our dumbed-down times.

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