Colored Television: A Novel
“an important book by an important author who understands only too well that heavy topics are most accessible when delivered with a spoonful of sugar.”
Colored Television is a sharp, comedic novel about the competing drives to make money and make art in one woman’s pursuit of her “American Dream.” Most of all, it is a novel that explores race and racial identities, portraying protagonist Jane, a mixed-race middle-aged mother, as she struggles for belonging in a society that seems either black or white. The mixed-race (white and Black) experience defines her life’s work, writing for the prior decade what her husband, Lenny, terms her “Mulatto War and Peace,” as well as how she thinks of her life, being born into an in-between place, perennially straddling a gap. Her actions in the novel are motivated by a desire for rootedness, epitomized by her young eyes in the perfect pages of home décor catalogs, and later manifested as a craftsman-style home surrounded by a picket fence, owning a labradoodle, in “Multiracial Mulberry,” where she’d be able to send her two children, Ruby and Finn, to a “blue-ribbon” public school.
Her character waffles between grit and confidence and an underlying insecurity that stems from her parents “[raising] her and her sister in a ghetto of artists and poets, guaranteeing that they would be alienated from rich children and poor children alike, thanks to a cultural and political vocabulary that suggested class and privilege without actual class and privilege – gauche caviar without the actual caviar. Jane remembered wishing at a certain point, Ruby’s age maybe, that she came from a dignified working-class immigrant family. Her kind of poverty was the loneliest kind, the least dignified kind, because her parents had chosen it. They had picked poetry over profit.”
In addition, she reflects on her own grade school experience as her daughter is the same age as when “Jane and her sister had been part of a program called METCO that bused a select group of Black children—a talented two percent as it were—from the inner city of Boston to the suburbs. Not too many, just enough to sprinkle those suburban white schools with seasoning. Jane had been sent to a school in Brookline, where she made a friend, a wan white girl with a funny laugh named Emma.”
A particularly poignant scene drives home Jane’s yearning on behalf of her children. She hosts Ruby’s birthday party in the glitzy home in which they are house-sitters, joined by guests they have met only recently, and presents her daughter with an expensive American Girl doll the family can’t afford, sending Ruby up to her bedroom in tears because if it was going to be her only American Doll she didn’t want the dark-skinned one.
It is Jane’s desire to provide stability for her children that makes her often cringe-worthy tactics redeemable. She is an academic on sabbatical aiming to finish her long-awaited second novel, the publication of which will help her rise in status at the college where she teaches, allowing her family to stop bouncing around Los Angeles in sublets and borrowed spaces.
As the novel opens, she sits in her friend’s borrowed home, in his borrowed office and borrowed desk, drinking up his wine and wearing his wife’s clothing. She finally feels motivated, gaining steam and ambition with the completion of her novel in sight, adding complexity to this multilayered opus that weaves together past and present voices of the mixed-race experience.
In the weeks between the submitted manuscript first impressing her agent (who obviously had yet to read it) and being brutally rejected by her editor, she indulges in optimistic house-hunting and spending. After accepting the rejection, although hiding it from her husband, she musters an earnest instinct to hustle, albeit dishonestly, justifying her actions as necessary to salvage her dreams for her family.
Jane is a complex yet sympathetic protagonist for whom the reader roots while also feeling dread as she lies to Lenny, pitches her friend’s TV agent, avoids his texts and calls, then takes meetings with players in the industry under false pretenses. Her idea is to turn the underlying themes of her novel into a comedic series, and she wins the opportunity to work with the up and coming showrunner, Hampton Ford. He is a Black man who senses he is benefitting from “a moment” and operates with the urgency to not squander the opportunity.
Together, they have high hopes of delivering something meaningful and profound that will push the TV watching public to be entertained by racial truths. When Jane feels guilt over her tenuous path, she justifies her actions by fixating on Lenny’s inability to make money from his art and the ticking clock of needing to find a home for her family. Jane’s father had instilled in her “Race is about money and money is about race. Black people don’t want to be white, they just want what white people have.”
The author’s observant eye and humor result in many brilliant, laugh-out-loud moments. Whether it be with regard to the arduous journey of the novelist as compared to the faster roll-out of TV shows, Jane’s insecurity in the face of her son’s special needs diagnosis, the absurdity of Los Angeles’s special brand of superficiality, or the way she used a psychic to help snare Lenny as her husband, this novel uses comedy to deliver the racial truths Jane had hoped a future TV series might.
Don’t let the comedic epitaph fool you. This is an important book by an important author who understands only too well that heavy topics are most accessible when delivered with a spoonful of sugar.