Feels more like a summer blockbuster ... Funny, foxy and fleet; it’s aspirational about money and luxury items and mocking of those aspirations. There are times, especially near the end, when you might wish Senna pushed deeper into the themes and the pain she lays bare, but the jokes are good, the punches land, the dialogue is tart ... The characters in Colored Television are wonderful talkers; they’re wits and improvisers who clock the absurdities of the human condition ... In the end, Senna delivers a mostly inspired, and mostly happy, series of narrative double axels that will make you reconsider who the true sellouts are.
Funny, awkward and discomfiting ... With lacerating humor and a multitude of similarly revealing moments, Colored Television illuminates the axes around which its novelist protagonist Jane's life teeters ... An exhilarating yet poignant riff on the struggling artist as a wannabe middle-aged sellout ... Throughout Colored Television, what stands out is the virtuosity of Senna’s writing, which is endlessly quotable and intensely, meaningfully provocative, wielding language and metaphor.
Sly ... It’s an exceptionally assured novel about trying to find a home and a job in a culture constantly swirling between denigrating racial identity and fetishizing it ... [A] shrewd comedy ... Pries open this self-referential premise to explore the quandary of being an artist of color in America, and it has a surprising amount of fun along the way.
Well-oiled, precisely choreographed ... Senna has a flair for sketching her characters with a kind of thick minimalism: Snippets of backstory and an array of ticks and quips deliver an unexpectedly fully realized person ... Here to tell us that deciding on some tidy new biracial identity to replace the stereotypical tragic mulatto is a farcical, futile exercise.
The author’s comical rendering of the travails of Jane...brilliantly portrays 2020s America ... 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 ... Senna’s sharp observations of wealth, class and race chisel away at the amorphous rock under which the couple are trapped.
Senna deftly scrambles hierarchies of race, class, and culture, leading Jane through an absurdist take on the culture machine, where the dynamics of industry approval are as labyrinthine as the cultural construction of race ... Senna does not excuse literary fiction from the ambivalence she extends toward the idea of authentic storytelling as a whole ... A fiction nestled inside a fiction nestled inside the larger fiction of race as essence rather than the shifty, market-driven thing that it is, that we find the book’s most urgent argument for the necessity of storytelling. A fiction can provide a home that can be cried for, satisfying a need to mourn that is more concrete than the loss itself. It may be a false home—but that doesn’t mean the tears can’t be real.
Senna deftly scrambles hierarchies of race, class, and culture, leading Jane through an absurdist take on the culture machine, where the dynamics of industry approval are as labyrinthine as the cultural construction of race ... Senna does not excuse literary fiction from the ambivalence she extends toward the idea of authentic storytelling as a whole ... A fiction nestled inside a fiction nestled inside the larger fiction of race as essence rather than the shifty, market-driven thing that it is, that we find the book’s most urgent argument for the necessity of storytelling. A fiction can provide a home that can be cried for, satisfying a need to mourn that is more concrete than the loss itself. It may be a false home—but that doesn’t mean the tears can’t be real.
A book that wants to be satire but can’t decide what world it’s living in ... Confused about who its enemies are ... Reads like a treatise on Why Representation Matters ... Who cares, though, if the main character’s annoying or self-serving or wrong? It doesn’t matter if we like her so long as the trip’s a gas. Sometimes Senna remembers this ... The book sputters because Senna can’t decide how seriously she wants us to take it. All the ingredients for a romp are there, from the blinkered heroine to the delicious possibilities of brain-dead Hollywood pitchspeak. Colored Television still manages to never really get that fun ... The novel ends up reading like an extended stress dream.
The experience of being mixed-race in America is crucial and ever-present, but Senna is also interested in the competing loyalties and difficult challenges faced by artists in any discipline ... Senna deploys increasingly lacerating observations of Hollywood. The writing is crisp, the tone cutting, and as is typical in a Senna novel, few people are spared ... Senna excitedly returns to her old stomping ground: lampooning the efforts to quantify racial authenticity. Along the way, she also satirizes the tension between artistic pursuits and cultural change-making ... Even as she indulges in the details of Jane’s domestic life, Senna maintains a steady grip on the more electric parts of the novel.
The writing is crisp, the tone cutting, and as is typical in a Senna novel, few people are spared ... A big twist at the end of the novel partially clarifies the relationship between the comedic and the sentimental, but until then these alternating threads compete with one another. At times, Jane’s domesticity makes Colored Television read like the kind of sitcom Jane and Lenny might privately mock. Yet even as she indulges in the details of Jane’s domestic life, Senna maintains a steady grip on the more electric parts of the novel.
Funny and cutting ... Slowly dilates into a fever dream as expansive as the Los Angeles metropolis ... Senna’s prose ripples with images of reflection, doubling, and hallucination.
Senna is a fabulously sly, provocative writer, seamlessly focusing race and privilege on virtually every page ... Senna again focuses on race and privilege in the novel Colored Television, with impressively engrossing, adroitly illuminating results.
Compelling ... The Los Angeles and Hollywood settings are vividly described, and Senna’s insights about identity, parenthood, and creativity are sure to captivate readers.
Writes with compassion for a heroine who is searching for her racial and social identities. In the end, Senna allows Jane the success her struggles have earned for her. Readers will be grateful for that.
