Danzy Senna’s Trick Mirror

Her latest novel, Colored Television, continues this subversive project. Building on her long-running interest in television as both a pastime and a trick mirror, the book is set in present-day Los Angeles, where novelist Jane Gibson wants to break into screenwriting. The career pivot is more a Hail Mary play than a creative shift. Jane and her husband, Lenny, a painter, are both wayward artists and untenured professors in desperate need of stability. They have two children, Finn and Ruby, but lack steady housing and employment. The family moves often, house-sitting for rich friends who “went away on sabbaticals and film shoots and retreats” and need “people to watch their possessions or pets or plants.” Jane’s family can access the outrageous wealth of the city, but they can’t claim it.

Before Jane sets her sights on television, she’s keen on finishing the bulging book that she’s been writing for nine years—“her mulatto War and Peace,” as Lenny jokes. The push to complete it is both aspirational and obligatory. The family has spent six months in an opulent house owned by a friend who’s away in Australia, a period that has coincided with Jane’s academic sabbatical. The catch is that the friend and his family will return in five months, and her sabbatical will end around the same time, so she’s placing tremendous pressure on one book, but the reverie consumes her.

The rare free time, and the splendor of the house, which has a courtyard, a stocked wine refrigerator, and five “special water-conserving toilets,” light a fire under Jane. If she could finish the book, she tells herself, “She’d publish it and get tenure, and they’d be middle class and maybe even have the money to buy a house of their very own.” She even has a neighborhood picked out, and has given it a nickname inspired by the idyll setting of The Andy Griffith Show: “Multicultural Mayberry.”