Maria’s confusion is central to the breakdown that follows her obsession, and Ms. Senna deftly draws it out in the way of an espionage thriller, peeling back her characters’ racial personas as though they were so many disguises ... The frankness with which New People treats race as a kind of public performance is both uncomfortable and strangely cathartic. Being a performance, it transforms easily into deception, and the story hinges on two hallucinatory sequences in which Maria falsifies her identity in order to sneak into the poet’s apartment. The ending of this brittle, provocative novel carries the fated sense of a utopia heading inexorably toward collapse.
It says a great deal for New People — Danzy Senna’s martini-dry, espresso-dark comedy of contemporary manners — that its compound of caustic observations and shrewd characterizations could only have emerged from a writer as finely tuned to her social milieu as [Jane] Austen was to hers ... We may not always like Maria. Yet, as with many a complex heroine of classic comedies-of-errors, we somehow keep faith with her struggles to reconcile her myriad convolutions and warring emotions ... The book doesn’t pour cold water on one’s expectations for a better, more tolerant world. In fact, it implies that world has, to a great extent, already arrived. Brave new worlds sometimes emerge when you’re not ready for them; whether in a stranger’s apartment or in your own, too-human heart.
...in New People, her captivating and incisive fifth book, Danzy Senna has crafted a tragicomic novel that powerfully conjures the sense of optimism once associated with future racial transcendence, even as it grounds that idealism in a present that bears more than just a family resemblance to the racialized past ... New People questions whether the notion of racial liberation truly offers a solution to the unfinished work of racial justice. It may also cause you to question whether completion is, in fact, a virtue.
Senna’s voice and narrative are distinct and compelling. And her conflicted, white-passing, multiracial protagonist Maria is both a believable — if exasperating — figure and a partial but disquietingly accurate embodiment of the United States in 2017. How do we live in our own skin, the novel seems to ask, when it is living in our own skin that causes so much grief? ... New People is a paean to the psychosocial complexities of being racially mixed, and, as a result, color-lines, passing, and double-consciousness are everywhere ... A patron saint of the eternally conflicted, Maria is always in search of an identity, even if it means doing what is most demeaning and disgusting to her. A victim of double-consciousness, Maria is forever thinking of what others think of her ... The novel’s ultimate message seems to be one both true and unsettling, if unsurprising: that color-lines have never left America and likely never will, and that those of us who walk between the lines may always be tormented, always followed by something dusky and doubtful we cannot quite catch sight of.
The release of New People six months after Donald Trump became president might be fortuitous. Although the conversation surrounding identity politics has become a much belabored point, still, to consider the alliances and nuances within race remains relevant ... as a novel, New People is not without its flaws. The story seems rushed, with dialogue that reads as too premature or out-of-place to be realistic. The ending may throw readers for a loop with its ambiguity, even if the open-endedness is compellingly provocative. But the question of 'Can you remember a time when you were really real?' reverberates on each page. Are any of these characters really real? Could they exist beyond the confines of their own knowledge of what it means to be black, or would they be destroyed by such a potentiality? What this novel succeeds in is creating a dense psychological portrait of a black woman nearing the close of the 20th century: inquisitive, obsessive, imaginative, alive. She is as puzzling as she is alluring, even if one may finish the novel feeling as though the issues are unresolved. Maybe that’s just how it is to live a life that transcends what’s written on the page.
Thrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Senna’s work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity. Her characters, and the clannish worlds they are often trying to escape, teeter on the brink of ruin and absurdity. Senna’s latest novel, the slick and highly enjoyable New People, makes keen, icy farce of the affectations of the Brooklyn black faux-bohemia ... There were moments when, reading New People, I wondered if Senna had crafted Maria as a rebuttal to the lure of relatability in black art, which is itself a new form of sobriety. Just when we think we understand Maria—as a wayward, Brooklyn twenty-something in search of stability just like everyone else—she shocks us ... For Senna, identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.
New People riffs on the themes she’s made her own — with a twist. It’s a novel that reads us. It anticipates, and sidesteps, lazy reading and sentimental expectations. In interviews, Senna has spoken with some weariness of the pressure to create positive depictions of mixed-race characters, to educate, to uplift. It’s a deep pleasure to see her shrug off such strictures and lavish her attention on the petty, the creepy and the galloping mad ... The material is hot but the style stays cool, as calm and impersonal as a hotel room. The tone is starched; each tight, tidy sentence has hospital corners ... She conjures up ’90s-era campus politics with pitiless accuracy...These are, admittedly, easy targets, but Senna lampoons the worlds she knows, the people she’s been. (Maria is her middle name.) This amused self-implication supplies her caricatures with their damning details but keeps them from feeling cruel ... These sections sing. They are so fluent, and seem to have been so much fun to write, that other strands of the story suffer neglect by comparison. Plot points and characters that seem significant are allowed to wither on the vine.
The thorniness of desire is inextricably intertwined here with the fraught history of race in America, and, as in Senna’s previous work, she aims to satirize characterizations of racial identity at every turn ...as an embodiment of the ways in which liberal-minded folks may not recognize their own blind spots when it comes to race, Senna’s seeming contrivance is perhaps painfully astute ... New People is not a beautiful novel, not the kind of book I finished reading with a deliciously mournful sigh. It is relentlessly grim — about the constructions of race in America and the consequences of those constructions, and about what constitutes bourgeois success — and it is this grimness that bestows its harsh ring of truth.
New People is an achievement in so many ways. It succeeds, to begin with, in capturing the psyche of a woman worn down by expectation. It also convincingly distills the essence of an 'intentional community' in bohemian black Brooklyn. And it manages to send up the literary tropes of biracial representation, in particular that of the 'tragic mulatto,' a mixed-race person who’s traumatized by their inability to fit neatly into distinct racial categories and their attendant social schema ... Just as this novel fits neatly into Senna’s oeuvre, it also chimes with and challenges the larger canon of works that take on multiracial identity.
In her latest novel, Danzy Senna bores into the dynamics of race, identity, heritage, poverty, and privilege in contemporary America, exposing the pride and promises of change therein, as well as the pitfalls and pathologies. Agile and ambitious, the novel is also a wild-hearted romance about secrets and obsessions, a dramedy of manners about the educated black middle-class—the 'talented tenth'—that is Senna's authorial home ground ... Senna is a master at unmasking the conflicted psyches as well as the societal pressures of her high-achieving yet vulnerable characters.
What’s the opposite of a love story? In Senna’s world, it’s a darkly comic psychological thriller. Her latest, New People, finds a wayward mixed-race academic named Maria fixating on an unnamed black poet and launching into the sublime destruction of her picture-perfect life ... Senna has written previously about the fault lines of identity (Caucasia) and unrequited passions that give way to obsession (Symptomatic), but in Maria’s unmoored reawakening she finds a cathartic release for universal anxieties around these themes ...has a talent for maintaining a rapport with readers even when Maria is at her most self-indulgent — and despite Maria herself being a less than likable character ...Senna’s antiheroine is winningly vulnerable when trying to make a home of a person, and New People is at its best when it delves into the worlds of Maria’s construction, or reconstruction.
Senna’s fearless novel is equal parts beguiling and disturbing ... Senna combines the clued-in status details you’d find in a New York magazine article with the narrative invention of big-league fiction. Every detail and subplot, including Maria’s dissertation on the Jonestown massacre and her buried secret about a college prank gone awry, is resonant. A great book about race and a great book all around.
Senna returns to long-form fiction in a muddled third novel featuring a protagonist in search of her identity ... Significant themes and issues are touched upon here but unfortunately get lost before fully landing.
