'Ten Years of Useless Labor'

On Danzy Senza's 'Colored Television'

Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956, Kunsthalle Tübingen

Danzy Senna’s Colored Television spent last summer winning praise from the usual legacy publications as The Novel We Need Right Now: A serious book by a seasoned author willing to sink her teeth into debates around race and class, “representation” and “inclusion” in post-2020 America. Senna has traversed this terrain for a quarter-century in fiction and memoir, deploying a mix of dark humor, historical insight, and pop-culture fluency to craft narratives of biracial women and men — or, to use the term she prefers, mulattos. On that model, Colored Television features quotations from Jefferson’s letters, parodies of mid-century sociology texts, meditations on Carol Channing, cameos by Kim and Kanye. But this collage of content is held together by forms and themes as old as the novel itself — mimetic desire, status-chasing, and marital troubles, to name a few. Much of the plot is set in motion by a scene that could have been ripped from the pages of Balzac, Dreiser, or Richard Wright, not to mention Cervantes: A woman sees an image of a happy family in a sales catalog, and tries to make her own life look like theirs. Personal and professional mayhem ensues, much of it very funny. Senna’s relentless cynicism will likely titillate the readers of the Good Morning America Book Club, but it also hamstrings her capacities as a social critic.

Jane Gibson and her husband Lenny are black artists living in genteel poverty while raising two children. Jane’s first and only novel debuted to critical praise and middling sales ten years ago, while Lenny’s abstract paintings are shown but never sold at prominent galleries. They support themselves by teaching heavy course-loads at L.A.-area universities and hopping between non-traditional housing arrangements. When the novel opens, they’re a few months into a year-long housesitting gig for Jane’s successful show-runner friend Brett. Jane and Lenny make themselves at home in Brett’s high-concept post-modern mansion, drinking their way through the wine cellar, raiding their hosts’ wardrobes, and neglecting to mention to guests that this is not actually their house. Jane also uses this period of relative comfort and stability to complete her second novel, a decade-in-the-making historical epic that Lenny calls a “mulatto War and Peace.” Spirits are high and the good life seems within reach, until her editor declares the manuscript unpublishable.

Discouraged and facing down the prospect of a future with neither commercial success nor the consolation prize of tenure, Jane decides to follow Brett’s footsteps into the TV business. She secures a meeting with Hampton Ford, a Kenya Barris stand-in with a mandate to diversify the network’s programming and an ambition to write “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Much of the novel’s second half consists of these two popping uppers while Jane spitballs hilariously offensive episode ideas — ex., a biracial couple take a DNA test to find out that one of them is part-Native American and the other is Irish on both sides; after which they immediately succumb to gambling addiction and alcoholism, respectively — and Hampton launches into increasingly unhinged rants about American blacks committing race-suicide via miscegenation. He eventually ghosts Jane, but not before stealing her rejected novel manuscript, which he adapts into an Emmy-winning series targeted at guilty white liberals. A rushed coda finds Jane back in the salt mines of mid-list literary fiction, Lenny finally finding success with his paintings after relenting on his principles and including references to his race on the canvas, and the family living a more-or-less solid bougie life in “Multicultural Mayberry” — aka Pasadena.

As one might expect from a satire of the representation-industrial-complex, Colored Television is structured at every level by problems of seeing and being seen. In one particularly on-the-nose moment, Jane imagines a younger version of herself watching at the window while she and Lenny make love in their borrowed bed, casting herself in the role of the upper-class wife and mother she has always wanted to be, while simultaneously casting herself out of the room, and into the position of a voyeur. Senna’s third person narration, so claustrophobically close to her protagonist that one can almost imagine replacing every mention of “Jane” with “I,” reads as if Jane is witnessing her own life from that third person point-of-view. She is well aware of this strained double-consciousness, and calls it her “mulatto-mirroring thing.” Even the house itself seems to concretize this process of self-splitting. A postmodern monstrosity of glass and wood, it simultaneously resembles a gigantic Emersonian eyeball “staring into its own navel” and a tube-television.

Given Jane’s extreme self-consciousness and the novel’s intense self-referentiality, I was surprised at how little time Senna’s writer-protagonist spends actually reflecting on her own work, which has supposedly been the driving obsession of her life for the past decade. Jane’s novel, titled Nusu-Nusu — Swahili for “partly-partly” (look, more doubling!) — is legible as an attempt at a modernist opus in the vein of the USA Trilogy or Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Drawing on four-hundred years of mulatto history in America, she juxtaposes past, present, and future, the historical and the fictional, document and speculation, all in a wild bricolage that her editor derides as “Frankensteinian.” It sounds like the sort of thing one might expect to see in the spring catalog of Deep Vellum or Fitzcarraldo. But is it any good? Senna leaves that ambiguous, and Jane’s judgement of it changes radically when she allows other people to read the manuscript for the first time. All it takes is one rejection letter to turn the book from a work of “immortal art” to a “monstrosity” in her eyes.

At the peak of her frustration, Jane refers to Nusu-Nusu as the product of “ten years of useless labor.” In context, this is clearly not an aesthetic judgment, but an economic one. The work was useless not because she has failed to create a great work of art (whatever that might mean), but because she can’t get it published. The market — embodied in her editor, whose authority is never questioned — is the great arbiter of value, and it has deemed her efforts worthless. Jane accepts this verdict, and Senna gives us, the readers, little reason to disagree with her. This is the great weakness of the book, and the reason it never rises above the level of comedy-of-manners style satire to the point of actual social critique.

As the novel progressed and Jane’s situation worsened with each hole she dug for herself, I found myself wondering more and more why this character had decided to become a novelist at all. She speaks about novel-writing as drudgery at best and masochism at worst. She spends most days pining for an upper-middle-class lifestyle that she knows she will not be able to afford by writing and teaching. She does not read for pleasure, and almost never thinks about other writers except to pity their failure or resent their success. If Jane ever believed that there was something intrinsically worthwhile about art or art-making, she has long abandoned that youthful naivety. She seems to have become a writer in the way that others become lawyers and doctors, following the professionalizing pathway of liberal arts college to MFA to agent to first book to academic career. And now, with the decline of a market for serious literary fiction and the dismantling of the humanities departments where such writers might find a home, Jane finds herself in middle age as a professional without a profession. Little wonder that she so enjoys the mechanical-reproduction of sitcom writing — it’s closer in spirit to the work she was trained to do.

To be fair to Senna, her intention was clearly to write a satire on the culture industry, not the künstlerroman of an avant-gardiste. She doesn’t preach, and she doesn’t flinch from depicting that industry or the careerists who populate it as they really are. But even though she seems to mock and punish Jane for her narcissism and misplaced class-envy, nothing in the novel refutes Jane’s assessment of the valuelessness of her own labor. As the belief in any intrinsic value of fiction has declined among the educated classes and the profit-margins on literary novels not written by Sally Rooney have shrunken, “representation” has emerged as a primary justification for the production of literary works, not to mention a major sales point. Senna rightly exposes this identitarianism as a neoliberal scam, but she offers not even the hint of anything that might take its place as a legitimate motivation for art-making. That dissatisfaction you feel in the final pages, as a reasonably happy ending unfolds apropos of nothing? It might just be the index of something missing at the heart of the novel itself: a reason for its existing at all.

Jon Repetti

is a writer and critic living in Philadelphia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in LARB, Review31, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He tweets @pourfairelevide.