COLORED TELEVISION by Danzy Senna

Jane, a novelist, and her husband, Lenny, a visual artist, are house-sitting for Jane’s friend Brett in his opulent L.A. home while Brett is in Australia.  Jane is writing a sprawling novel about mulattos, like herself, and Lenny is working on paintings for a show in Japan.  Their credit card debt is mounting, but they are treating Brett’s possessions as their own, even drinking all of his very expensive vintage wines.  When Jane finishes her novel and her editor tells her that it will tank Jane’s career if published, Jane decides to take a page out of Brett’s book, so to speak, and get work in television.  Lying to her husband and to Brett about the fate of her novel, among other things, Jane soon finds that she has spun a tangled web of lies that is probably going to unravel at some point and cause her life to spiral out of control.  The first one hundred pages or so of this book fell completely flat for me, and then it became a book about a woman doing incredibly stupid and dishonest things.  I just totally ran out of sympathy for Jane, who aspires to Brett’s lifestyle but is going about it all wrong.  Eventually we discover that she is not even the most deceitful character in the book, nor does she have the gumption to confront that person, perhaps because she is just as guilty herself.  There is some karma in the stealing-of-intellectual-property department, but, other than that, everyone here gets off the hook too easily.