Colored Television
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.
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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.
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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.
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