In recent times, television and film have relied heavily on nostalgia and repetition, leading us to pedestrian on-screen material. You might expect, then, that contemporary novels of Hollywood would need to be broad, bland. Danzy Senna’s fifth novel, the satiric Colored Television, is anything but. The book is a send-up of Los Angeles and the TV and film industry, and also, a send-up of us, the audience, and what we demand of our dreams and entertainments; an early line sets our expectations about Senna’s sensibility: “Every story about the apocalypse was really about Los Angeles.” At Colored Television’s center is Jane, a melancholy middle-aged East Coast transplant and biracial novelist who is shocked to discover that her editor doesn’t want to buy her second novel—a book spanning a “four-hundred-year history of mulatto people” that she’s been working on for years. Feeling washed-up, she house-sits—along with her family—for an old screenwriter friend who has made it big and springboards off his success into a series of minor deceptions on her way to working with a big shot producer on the “Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Senna’s unconventional fiction often taps into themes of race, racial performance, and doubling, all in her elegant, pristine prose and perfect, deadpan delivery of funny narrative turns and reversals. But the fun in this one! Colored Television leaves us pleasingly unsettled, grateful for its superb ruthlessness and electric originality.
AUTHOR DANZY SENNA IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN FREEMAN
When: Thursday, September 19, 2024, 5 p.m. Pacific time.
Format: Freeman will lead a free hour-long conversation with Senna, which will include a reading by her and questions from the audience. Produced by Alta Journal for streaming on Zoom.
