A deliciously funny and heartfelt novel about life in Los Angeles as a novelist who thinks that writing for TV will solve her problems. (It doesn't.) Jane makes some bad choices, but you can't help but root for her, her artist husband (whose paintings rarely sell), and their family as a whole to make it in this impossible city and finally get that great apartment in "multicultural Mayberry."
When Jane's plans to write a great epic novel don't work out she turns to trying to write the "biracial juggernaut" of comedy TV shows, all the while trying to shepherd her family through a fraught time. Full of humor, striving, hope, and pathos in a world where everything is precarious, it also brings a sharp outsider eye to a lot of givens (Hollywood, the weather, academia, redemptive endings) that a lot of Angelenos might take for granted. Will this family make it through? You gotta hope and you gotta read to the end!
Danzy Senna's protagonists have no problem speaking plainly; they often voice, aloud or to themselves, their most revealing thoughts. Jane, a biracial novelist and professor living in Los Angeles and the protagonist of Colored Television, is no different. When we first meet her she's about to finally complete her Great American Novel; when her agent rejects it, panic and hilarity ensue. Colored Television is full of lines that made me laugh out loud and thrilled me with their boldness. A great novel about creative persistence, the difficulties of parenting, and the ever so lofty American Dream.
“Incisive, of the moment, and darkly funny, I loved everything about Colored Television. Very few contemporary authors can so acutely examine race and class while maintaining a razor-sharp sense of humor, but Danzy Senna is in a league of her own.”
— David Vogel, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI
Description
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK
A WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR
“A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy… This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard.” –LA Times “Funny, foxy and fleet…The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times
A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia
Jane has high hopes that her life is about to turn around. After a long, precarious stretch bouncing among sketchy rentals and sublets, she and her family are living in luxury for a year, house-sitting in the hills above Los Angeles. The gig magically coincides with Jane’s sabbatical, giving her the time and space she needs to finish her second novel—a centuries-spanning epic her artist husband, Lenny, dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.” Finally, some semblance of stability and success seems to be within her grasp.
But things don’t work out quite as hoped. Desperate for a plan B, like countless writers before her Jane turns her gaze to Hollywood. When she finagles a meeting with Hampton Ford, a hot producer with a major development deal at a streaming network, he seems excited to work with a “real writer,” and together they begin to develop “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Things finally seem to be going right for Jane—until they go terribly wrong.
Funny, piercing, and page turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.
About the Author
Danzy Senna is the bestselling author of six previous books, including Caucasia, New People, and most recently Colored Television. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.
Praise For…
Praise for Colored Television:
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME MAGAZINE
“Delightfully head spinning. Senna unfurls a novel that somehow deconstructs its own racial preoccupations, as though she’s riding a unicycle up and down a set of Escher staircases…The way [she] keeps this wry story aloft may be the closest paper can come to levitation.”—The Washington Post
“[A] cutting exploration of an artist’s striving and dreaming and flailing in the shadow of Hollywood’s dream factory. . . exhilarating yet poignant. . .endlessly quotable and intensely, meaningfully provocative. . .Senna's ungentle satire masterfully explores and explodes the psyche . . .of a woman trying to level up on family, work and race in a post-post-racial America.”—NPR “[A] searing look at personal authenticity, the struggles of a creative life, and the powerful impact of racial identity.”—Christian Science Monitor “[A] tart, incisive portrait—both of the country and of the narcissistic task of self-commodification.”—The New Yorker “A sharp, hilarious page-turner about art, identity and the cost of success.”—People
“Suspenseful and funny, caustic and hilarious.”—Book Reporter “This clever, itchy-making, and often hilarious novel is unsparing on identity-driven fiction and creative working conditions under capitalism.”—LitHub
“Droll and carefully observed fiction. [Senna] writes with a committed irreverence about biracial women and the social worlds and identities they straddle, and she dutifully avoids respectability or sentimentality. . . dilates into a fever dream as expansive as the Los Angeles metropolis.”—The New Republic
“Hilarious.”—Boston Globe
“[A] gem from Danzy Senna—more perceptive and bitingly funny than ever.”—Vanity Fair
“With one hilarious scene and outrageous observation after another, Senna hits it out of the park.” —Newsday
“Funny, foxy and fleet. . .The jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart. The characters in Colored Television are wonderful talkers; they’re wits and improvisers who clock the absurdities of the human condition. You often feel you’re listening in on a three-bottles-into-it dinner party.”—The New York Times
“Senna’s humor mixes with her deep understanding of cultural foibles and the human heart to produce a novel that is simultaneously a laugh-out-loud cultural comedy and a riveting novel of ideas . . . .The complexity of all of these issues contained in a single novel might have intimidated a lesser writer. Senna turns what could have been heavy into a celebratory triumph filled with joy and love. . . This is the New Great American Novel, and Danzy Senna has set the standard.”—Los Angeles Times
“The biting, incisive, and hilarious Colored Television. . . skewers Hollywood culture while offering a thoughtful take on how creatives balance making art with making a living.” —Real Simple “A no-holds-barred satire of literary ambition and Hollywood seduction with a racing human heart. . .With her sharp eye and take-no-prisoners humor, Senna exposes both the specific absurdities of the publishing world and the universal absurdities of trying—and inevitably failing—to have it all.”—Oprah Daily
"[A] brilliant, of-the-moment, just really almost perfect book."—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED
“A complex and satisfying portrait of a woman struggling with the categories that define her.” –Publishers Weekly
"I couldn’t stop turning the pages, and only when it was all over did I realize what Senna had done. Addictive, hilarious and relatable, yes, but Colored Television is after something larger and more elusive, a very modern reckoning with the ambiguities triangulated by race, class, creativity and love. She nails it."—Miranda July, author of All Fours and The First Bad Man
“A riveting and exhilarating novel about making art and selling out, about being middle aged and precariously middle class. As fearless as she is funny, Danzy Senna is one of this country’s most thrilling writers.”—Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind “Hilarious. Senna writes with tenderness about the debasement of aspiration, and she renders with acuity the mad place in the mind where fixation meets avoidance." —Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“If you thought California was burning before, wait until you read how literary arsonist Danzy Senna gleefully incinerates its values through the eyes of Jane Gibson—a heroine whose insecurity, mistakes, and lies will keep you riveted from start to finish.” —James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foodsand Nobody Gives a Shit What Happened to Carlotta
“Twisty, turny, and refreshingly relatable. You'll read and wonder, ‘Is she in my head?’ I adore this novel.”—Mateo Askaripour, author of Black Buck
“Incisive, of the moment, and darkly funny, I loved everything about Colored Television. Very few contemporary authors can so acutely examine race and class while maintaining a razor-sharp sense of humor, but Danzy Senna is in a league of her own.”