The author and USC professor talks about her new novel, teaching the next generation and how Los Angeles can feel ‘ahistorical.’
In Danzy Senna’s provocative and funny new novel, “Colored Television,” a writer named Jane is at the end of her rope – and it’s fraying badly. hile her friends have found success in television, her decade-in-the-making sophomore novel remains unfinished; her precarious financial situation will get worse if she doesn’t publish and get tenure. Her husband’s artistic purism renders his paintings purposely unsellable.
It’s an interesting tone to me and it’s a really hard thing to write but comedy and literary fiction have been uneasy bedfellows. And I can’t really write things that are just one tone of seriousness so I did start to dabble a bit in Hollywood over the last seven years, but nothing really kind of came of it.
I grew up in a household in which race was often a subject of humor – we joked about it constantly. In my work, race is an opportunity for play and for humor as much as it is for serious excavation. Q. The first sentence, “Jane had to remind herself it was February,” seems to be about Jane’s sense of dislocation within her world. Where did that line come from?
And this book is very much about money and class. And in Los Angeles that can be divorced from family lineage and name. You can be talking to your Uber driver and in their head, they’re just two meetings or two auditions away from becoming the next Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington. There’s a sense of incredible possibility to jump into another class at any moment with one lucky meeting. I love that about this town, but it’s a kind of hysteria and mania too, so it’s fascinating.
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