“Colored Television” is a novel about capitalism, race, gender, parenthood, creativity and yearning; it is, in short, a Great American Novel. That’s a breathless way to start a review, but Senna’s story, set in Los Angeles, is also about the perpetual divide between commerce and art, and the novelist’s deft handling of all these multiple themes deserves such praise. The author’s comical rendering of the travails of Jane – her Gen X, mixed race, financially vulnerable, creative writer protagonist – brilliantly portrays 2020s America, where multiple identities are not only intersectional but in constant flux and available to be donned as fashionable costumes or claimed by anyone seeking their cachet.
Senna’s mastery of writing shines throughout “Colored Television.” Critical categories insist that farce is a lower form of humor than satire, but that’s just another form of the kind of artificial gate-keeping whose tensions run through “Colored Television.” 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.
Jane and Lenny have been a pair since their meeting years before in New York, when Jane was directed by a fortune teller to look for “a Black man who was funny — a Black man who would be wearing ‘West Coast’ shoes.” Lenny sports a funny T-shirt and a pair of Vans. “On one of their first dates .
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