Colored Television

February 1, 2024

Senna (author of the multi-best-booked New People) returns with a Hollywood story featuring writer Jane, who finds a luxury house-sitting gig for her and her family while she finishes her novel. When that goes wrong, Jane turns to Hollywood and lands a deal to create a biracial comedy for TV, which also doesn't go as planned. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2024
A struggling Los Angeles novelist succumbs to Hollywood’s siren call in the mordant latest from Senna (Caucasia). Jane, the daughter of an interracial couple, is on a one-year sabbatical from her creative writing professorship. She’s trying to finish her sprawling, long-languishing second novel, a “mulatto War and Peace” about literature’s mixed-race heroines. When her editor reacts to the manuscript with confusion, Jane questions her commitment to an art form that, in her view, has been superseded by prestige television: “Being a novelist in Los Angeles was not unlike being an Amish person.” Concealing her plan from her husband, an abstract painter unwilling to make concessions to the market, Jane successfully pitches an idea for a biracial comedy to Hampton Ford, a Black TV showrunner looking for “diverse content,” and is plunged into the shark-filled waters of Hollywood creators. The novel generates some suspense through Jane’s and Ford’s various ethical lapses, but it’s predominantly carried along by the strength of Senna’s sardonic voice, which homes in on everything from the photogenic qualities of mixed-race children (“No one wants to have white babies anymore”) to the debilitating effects on a writer of leading fiction workshops, which Senna likens to a “series of mini-strokes.” The result is a complex and satisfying portrait of a woman at odds with the categories that define her. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
When her second novel hits a wall, a biracial California writer makes a desperate attempt to start a TV career. One of the funniest scenes in this brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect book happens early on, in a flashback to the party in Brooklyn where Jane met Lenny, her husband and the father of their two kids. Feeling that she's aging out of the dating game, Jane has recently consulted an "intuitive psychodynamic counselor with a specialty in racial alchemy," aka a psychic, who told her she's about to meet her future husband, a funny, tall, handsome Black man who would be wearing "West Coast shoes." But when she meets Lenny, who seems to perfectly fit this description, he's with a very possessive White girlfriend. "Ebony and ivory, together in disharmony...perhaps because it was her origin story, she could not bear the sight of interracial love." She calls the psychic from the party to confirm. The psychic says it's definitely him, and then goes into a rant against intermarriage. "Listen, our ancestors didn't survive the horrors of the Middle Passage so some Caucasoid poet could miscegenate us out of existence." He also says that if she doesn't get this guy, she'll be alone for 24 years. That gets her moving. And since Senna is married to the writer Percival Everett, it's kind of fun to imagine that this intellectual, anti-capitalist, abstract visual artist husband is sort of...yeah. But that's just one of the great things. The rant about teaching Gen Z versus Millennial college students is sure to kill any college professor ("She had in recent years begun to assign only minimalist autofiction by queer POC authors to her undergraduates, and she had to admit it was a better classroom experience for all"), and the story of Jane's doomed second novel, an opus on biracial characters in history that she's spent 10 years writing, is literary satire par excellence, like R.F. Kuang's Yellowface or Everett's Erasure. Anyone who's ever been obsessed with a Hanna Andersson catalog: You are also the target market. The only reason we said "almost perfect" earlier is that there's a big plot twist that doesn't quite compute, but if you care, that makes one of us. That's entertainment.

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July 19, 2024

Senna's latest novel takes readers into the life of Jane Gibson, a professor with several shaky relationships which become shakier as she strains toward a tenure that seems to retreat from her by the minute. Jane is obsessed with the fact that she is biracial, an obsession that pulls her in two racial directions at once. She is also a failed novelist: her epic book, on which she has worked nine years, is rejected by both publisher and agent, endangering her bid for tenure. In desperation, she tries her hand at writing for a television comedy. Complications ensue with her financially unsuccessful painter husband, as well as with her successful TV producer best friend and the impossible-to-please producer of the show she's trying to write for. Despite the various conflicts, there are no villains in this book. VERDICT The author of Caucasia, Symptomatic, and others writes with compassion for a heroine who is searching for her racial and social identities. In the end, Senna allows Jane the success her struggles have earned for her. Readers will be grateful for that.--Michael F. Russo

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2024
The pitfalls and traps of artistic success are explored in the latest compelling novel by Senna (New People, 2017). Novelist and creative writing professor Jane and her family have an itinerant lifestyle, moving from one temporary home to another, never feeling settled. They begin house-sitting for a year in a tony Los Angeles neighborhood, while Jane takes a sabbatical to work on the novel about mixed-race characters in history that she's been writing for years. When she submits it, it is roundly misunderstood, reflecting the way she's felt as a mixed-race woman and artist for most of her life. Disillusioned and frustrated, she decides to try her hand at writing for television and successfully pitches a biracial comedy show, thus gaining an eye-opening perspective on the cutthroat world of television. Senna is adept at voice and character. Jane is portrayed with humor and pathos, her wry, revealing observations throughout the novel make the story engaging. The Los Angeles and Hollywood settings are vividly described, and Senna's insights about identity, parenthood, and creativity are sure to captivate readers. Give to fans of Erasure (2001).

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