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I'm always intrigued by stories about not fitting in. And racial not fitting in is particularly interesting. I loved M. Kamau Bell's documentary about being multiracial: Growing Up Mixed where the interviewees were pretty young. I've known lots of mixed-race adult women and those who look white seem to have a kind of ferocity about identifying as Black. So I was interested, if not compelled, by the first hundred pages of Colored Television:

Danzy Senna's protagonist Jane Gibson seems equally ferocious about her Blackness, her entitlement, her racial judgments and rage about appropriation even as she wantonly appropriates without permission or remorse from other people's lives—everything from her husband to houses to wine, clothing, toys, and professional contacts. She laments her lostness and its historical roots in Melungeons (people with mixed ancestry who primarily settled in the Appalachian Mountains of the United States) in her bungled attempt to conquer the white world of success in the TV business, but she is firmly rooted—both in the writing and her perspective—in her much mentioned Gen X category: the book is filled with pop culture and brand name references (with the assumption that they are a shared vocabulary), and delivered through a perspective that is siloed in the Los Angeles definition of success through money and prestige.

But then comes chapter 9.

Jane, a mulatto married to a Black painter, has been working for ten years on an epic novel about mulattos throughout history, and her story is worth reading just for the education because it illuminates the ferocity—albeit in one particular character's experience. But in chapter 9, we enter the full human mess of being desperate to make a living, the consequences of desperation and lying, and its roots.

Plot cranks up, you understand all the seemingly slick stuff that has come before, and suddenly I was turning pages to see what happened next. And rather than mildly disliking Jane, I wanted to jump into the book and yell at her, to warn her to stop lying! So I guess I cared about her—surprise because it certainly didn't start out that way. The tension built as her whole life becomes an act, and the story ignites � for a while.

For me, this was not a funny book, not the dark comedy described in the book flap copy. I mostly felt sad for this lying woman and her family of "kids � born lazy, jaded, and ironic like us [Jane and her husband]. (240)" and addicted to "the accoutrements of a life well played. (254)"—too artsy, liberal, and Brahmin to stomach the chronic homelessness that their inability to make a living mandated.

Ultimately, this is a story of being an in-between person with questionable ethics. And even though it is very much about the mixed-race experience, I think it is about a lot of humans—even those who don't live in the plastic world of the Los Angeles TV business.

P.S. I found myself identifying mostly with Jane's husband, the painter. His patience and tolerance moved me.

***
It's now three days after finishing Colored Television. I have not read anything else in the interim because the character of Jane Gibson, or more truthfully, my severe reaction to her in the beginning of the book threw me into a funk. I was actually depressed for a couple of days.

Since I am a person who contemplates and tries to get to the personal truth about such things, I've done my process:

First of all, Jane's plot closely resembles my character Zelda McFigg's plot in my 2014 novel The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg (which I am republishing as I type). Both women are driven by a craving for "success" and both do dishonest things to survive and chase the illusive prize. Zelda is a grotesque character, physically and mentally, and as I wrote her, I laughed and adored her. Yet, when I read Jane Gibson, even though her lies and appropriations were much more traditional than Zelda's, I judged her so harshly.

Why?

Because she was not hilariously funny, an alien from the work-a-day world, like my character?

No, I judged her because she is reflection of my own craving which I thought I'd purged. Apparently not. It brought to the surface all the lingering "ick" that I'd like to deny. And it made me sick and depressed.

Now that I'm admitting it, I am feeling better. Perhaps if I read the book a second time, I'd laugh more. I'm not gonna. But I am going to raise my rating to 5 stars because any book that can get under my skin as this one did deserves all the stars.