Colored Television by Danzy Senna

´Novel writing was too much´.

Jane, the main protagonist of latest novvel by Danzy Senna, Colored Television, is writer, the daughter of a white mother and a black father, divorced now, and has two children, with a black abstract painter. Moving from the East to the West coast, she is enjoying house sitting expensive mansions, this time in a posh neighbourhood in LA. She has dreams on her own, purchasing a house in a diverse fancy neighbourhood with the money from a book contract. A book that her beloved husband called ´mulatto War and Peace´, but it seems he is the only one who really appreciated the result of her almost a decade of writing.

Senna who is sharing a similar background - except that her husband, Percival Everett is a writer and she is quite successful herself - but all those details instead of complicating the general framework, it only allows the narrative to suit the framework in a smooth way. Colored Television is a novel about ambitions, class dreams of bourgeois-intellectuals and over intensive identity politics. The intensity and frequence of a wish make it desirable, an objective in itself. One writes a book or a plot for the status - social and financial - it brings. Thus, it doesn´t matter if you are a novelist or a screenwriter. Fame guarantees a stable future, a tenure, money to send your children to private schools, that house with a pool.

Although I feel tired by books about identity politics - and nothing more - Colored Television is so ironically smart that is worth reading it even only for the intelligent fun. Despite being moderatelly critic; after all, who will refuse the chance of a fancy mansion? Intellectuals need to enjoy life too, isn´t it?

Rating: 3 stars

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Book Review: The Trees by Percival Everett

 ´History is a motherfucker´.

Shortlisted for this year edition of Booker Prize, The Trees by Percival Everett is an ironic story based on a terrible episode in the history of racial relations: the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. Likewise, the action of the book is set in Money, Mississippi, only that the victims of the series of lynchings are white. They also bear hilarious name, of the kind usually attributed to black protagonists: Granny C., Junior Junior, Wheat Bryant. 

The search for the culprits is done by black officers employed by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, but they are faced with an additional challenge: on the site of the crimes, which are multiplying from a day to another, a mysterious black man corpse appears and disappears. It´s the same over and over again.

The irony is intelligent and the references are obvious, however the literary layer involving the story development and the narrative, as well as character development. The Trees demonstrates that one can write about race and racial dissent in so many literary ways. Also, it´s a good reminder that irony can be such a powerful literary weapon.

Rating: 4 stars