Danzy Senna Can't Stop Thinking in Black and White

Her latest novel holds diminishing returns.

- MADELINE LEUNG COLEMAN

JANE GIBSON IS already telling lies when she realizes that she's suspected of telling a different one. The protagonist of Danzy Senna's Colored Television has been sitting in a conference room with a big-shot TV guy named Hampton Ford, making him think she's an accomplished writer and full professor who's ready to quit books for TV-when in fact she's a onetime novelist with a recently rejected second book and an untenured teaching gig. She's pitching him on a series: "a comedy about a kooky but lovable mulatto family." Mulatto is the term she prefers for herself. She's ready to defend her idea. But Hampton, who's Black, is busy studying her face. "What's your numbers breakdown? Like, percentages?" he asks, peering at her. Then he goes further: "You got a family photo?" Of course, Jane has one in her wallet. She's so often mistaken for white that she lives in a state of vigilance, ready to throw down her bona fides. Although she never says so directly, we sense that, for her, being seen the wrong way reopens a wound-and that's why, Senna writes, people like her keep family photos at hand, "like yellow stars." This is not Senna's first whirl with mixed-race neurosis. (For some of us, it's a lifelong project.) Colored Television is her fourth novel that follows a woman who looks and worries like Jane does—she's a light-skinned, mixed-race Black woman who has to work hard to be seen by others the way she sees herself. The Senna woman is a little lost, a little angry, and, more often than not, a liar. In her fiction, Senna uses lies like starting fluid: These plots aren't moving until the main character begins deceiving.