Early in Colored Television, 46-year-old Jane Gibson imagines her past self peering through the window of the home she lives in. “Brooklyn Jane” would admire this architecturally interesting house on the hills overlooking Los Angeles, she thinks, and see within it an idyllic scene of family life featuring Jane’s painter husband Lenny – “From a distance, in his horn-rimmed glasses, reading his serious book, he would look like an inspired choice” – and their two children, Ruby and Finn. The vision is warm, sophisticated, “a Black bohemian version of the American dream”.
In this sly novel about dreams, ambition and race as performance, Jane’s fantasy is telling. Because what she carefully edits out are the unlovely truths underneath its gleaming surface: that she and Lenny had been in couples therapy until their money ran out. That Lenny’s paintings don’t sell. That Jane has been toiling over a sprawling novel for 10 years, a “400‑year history of mulatto people in fictional form”, which she must publish in order to get tenure. That her son’s unusual behaviour may merit a doctor’s diagnosis. And, finally, that the beautiful house and its accoutrements don’t belong to them; the family are merely house sitting for Jane’s wealthy screenwriter friend Brett, because the only places they can afford in the greater LA area are “not just overpriced but ugly, smelly, and dark”.
Danzy Senna has made a career of investigating the delicate psychological terrain that comes with being biracial, and Colored Television, her sixth book, is no exception. Interspersed throughout the novel are quotes from a fictional scholar, a white man who argues that “the mulatto in America would always remain poised between worlds, in psychological uncertainty – ‘an other even amongst others’”. Even as we take his words with ambivalence – they drip with condescension and a need to categorise – we see his observations resonate with Jane’s life.
A sense of playacting pervades the novel. When Jane interacts with others, she feels herself slipping into what she calls “that mulatto mirroring thing”, where she adopts the verbal style of whoever she’s talking to. She finally finishes her novel, but her editor and agent refuse to publish it. Desperate, she attempts the world of television, where she tries her best to inhabit the role of a witty, intelligent novelist, a creator of high art. She dons various outfits that never quite seem appropriate: she overdresses for a late-night brainstorming session and meets the head of the network looking like “some kind of 14-year-old skater boy”. She can’t shake a nagging feeling of impostor syndrome. “And which part was she faking?” Jane wonders. “That she was a television writer or that she was a novelist? That she was Black or that she was white?”
To make matters worse, her success in television seems to hinge on her ability to perform her identity – whatever it is – to the utmost. The centre of her new universe is Hampton Ford, a powerful Black producer to whom she pitches a lighthearted comedy that just happens to feature a biracial family, a show that might redress the tendency to portray mixed-race characters as either “dangerously sexual” or “sad and mopey”. Initially, Hampton is eager to work with her: her status as a novelist promises to lend a “premium” air to their putative show. But Jane remains desperate to please him even as he delivers unhinged disquisitions on “mixed nuts” and dismisses her ideas as not biracial enough. “Just remember, we’re trying to represent,” he tells her. “That’s the magic word here. Represent.”
Senna wants us to ask: represent what, exactly? Her novel resists obvious answers, rejects the attempt to neatly package something as complex and ordinary as a human life. Near the end, Jane herself looks through the windows of the house at her family. The view seems “flat, staged, an imitation of life” – the architecturally interesting house, we realise, is itself a sort of gigantic television. But even as Jane grasps that her picture-perfect dreams are hollow, we gain a poignant sense of their source: an unmoored childhood bouncing between her divorced Black father and white mother – a youth spent, appropriately enough, watching TV. It’s a scene that perfectly sums up this allusive, artfully assembled book.
• Colored Television by Danzy Senna is published by Dialogue (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
