In an essay published in 2006 , the novelist Paul Beatty recalled the first book hed ever read by a black author. When the Los Angeles Unified School Boardout of the graciousness of its repressive little heartsent him a copy of Maya Angelous I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, he made it through a few maudlin pages before he grew suspicious, he wrote. I knew why they put a mirror in the parakeets cage: so he could wallow in his own misery. Observing that the defining characteristic of the African-American writer is sobriety, Beatty described his own path toward a black literary insobriety, one that would lead to the satirical style of his novels White Boy Shuffle and The Sellout . Along the way, he discovered a select canon of literary black satire, including Zora Neale Hurstons freewheeling story The Book of Harlem and Cecil Browns The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger.

Danzy Senna, Beattys friend and fellow novelist, makes an appearance in that essay, smiling wistfully as she shows him the cover of Fran Rosss hilarious 1974 novel, Oreo. As Senna later wrote in the foreword to the novels reissue , Oreo, about a biracial girl searching for her itinerant white father, manages to probe the idea of falling from racial grace while avoiding mulatto sentimentalism. Since her 1998 dbut novel, Caucasia, a stark story about two biracial sisters, Senna, like Ross before her, has developed her own kind of insobriety, one focussed on comically eviscerating the archetype of the tragic mulattothat nineteenth-century invention who experiences an emotional anguish rooted in her warring, mixed bloods. Both beautiful and wretched, the mulatto was intended to arouse sympathy in white readers, who had magnificent difficulty relating to black people in literature (to say nothing of life). Senna, the daughter of the white Boston poet Fanny Howe and the black editor Carl Senna, grew up a member of the nineties Fort Greene dreadlocked lite; her light-skinned black characters, who dodge the constraints of post-segregation America, provide an excuse for incisive social satire. Thrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Sennas work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity. Her characters, and the clannish worlds they are often trying to escape, teeter on the brink of ruin and absurdity.

Sennas latest novel, the slick and highly enjoyable New People , makes keen, icy farce of the affectations of the Brooklyn black faux-bohemia in which Maria, a distracted graduate student, lives with her fianc among the new Niggerati. Maria and Khalil Mirskythe latters name a droll amalgamation of his black and white Jewish parentageare the same shade of beige. At their weddingto be held on Marthas Vineyard, that summer bastion of interracial prosperitythey will break a glass (Jewish) and jump the broom (black). Khalil thinks he knows why the New York Times gave them a wedding announcement: Were mulatto, he says to Maria. Everybody loves mulatto. The novels title shares its name with a documentary about this new, post-Loving v. Virginia generationborn in the late sixties to early seventies, the progeny of the Renaissance of Interracial Unionsand the mawkish hope they inspire in the bourgeois class. Were like a Woody Allen movie, with melanin, Khalil jokes to the white documentarian.

There is a hyper-specificity to Sennas satire that occasionally recalls Dave Chappelles barbed Racial Draft sketch: the couples favorite song is Al Greens Simply Beautiful; their favorite novel is Giovannis Room ; they sing the futurist liberation song If I Ruled the World, by Nas and featuring Lauryn Hill, at Fort Greene house parties. Khalil, who works in tech, has grown dreads past Basquiat but not quite Marley. Maria perms her hair to make it look kinkier. In fact, most of the characters in the novel are trying to make their blackness more palpable. Gloria, a militant academic who dies before completing a thesis on the triple consciousness of black women, was disappointed to discover, months after adopting Maria, that her baby was light-skinned enough to pass as Jewish, Italian, or Jewlatto. In an extended flashback, we learn that Maria and Khalil met at Stanford shortly before Khalil underwent a born-again negritude, publishing a column in the school newspaper in which he denounces the color-blind humanism that had left him unprepared for the racism of the world. Later, when the couple are engaged, Marias obsession with the poet, a dark-skinned black man (not one of the new people) whom she first sees at a reading, forms the central plot of the book: a quest for an unattainable, an uncomplicated blackness.

Maria, Sennas anti-heroine, is puzzlingseductively so. There are moments when she resembles the classic mulattress. She is alienated from her mother, whom she doesnt resemble. She is a hysteric, experiencing panics and peculiar lapses in memory. By the time we meet her, in her late twenties, Maria lives in brownstone Brooklynbut really she exists in her own private swoon, easily caught in peripheral drifts, always running late. In an early episode, on her way to a wedding gown fitting, a college acquaintance intercepts her and invites her inside what turns out to be a Church of Scientology. (Naturally, her personality test reveals her perilous potential.) The scene is dreamlikemordant at first, and then increasingly chilling; Maria, it is clear, is too easily swayed. She finally makes it to the fitting, late. Five gowns displayed on mannequin bodies on the opposite side of the room. They stand in a row, headless, waiting for her to fill them.

Recently, a new character has emerged in popular culture. Like Issa Rae of Insecure , or the eponymous heroine of The Incredible Jessica James, this modern black woman flaunts her neuroses with style. The carefree black girl is an archetype spawned of the Interneta woman who quirkily breaks expectations of how black women ought to behave in society. As Bim Adewunmi recently wrote of Jessica, Her race is not at the center of this movie. But the story is structured around this tall and interesting black woman, and thats something that is rare and wonderful. Listless and dreamy, these women are perfectly imperfectand their imperfections are carefully tailored to evoke in their black viewers a sense of recognition.

There were moments when, reading New People, I wondered if Senna had crafted Maria as a rebuttal to the lure of relatability in black art, which is itself a new form of sobriety. Just when we think we understand Mariaas a wayward, Brooklyn twenty-something in search of stability just like everyone elseshe shocks us. Far from being a victim, she is slightly feral; her crush on the poet, which begins as distraction from academia-induced agita, slowly becomes a hunt. When, after sitting next to him at a birthday dinner, she notices that he has left behind his Pittsburgh Steelers hat, it is almost as if she had willed it. She sniffs the hat for days, soon concocting a plan to return it to him.

At other moments, she seems sociopathic. So much of New People is about the erosion of feeling. We learn that, as a child at an ice rink, Maria dropped a skate down a flight of stairs, hitting another skater on the head. It was an accident, but Marias disinterest in admitting any fault makes her seem vicious. Later, horrifyingly, she shakes a baby to surprise her out of her fury, the way men in old movies slap the hysterical woman across the face. An early turning point occurs in the flashback, during Khalils activist awakening. Maria, irritated by her boyfriends incipient righteousness, plays a prank by leaving a voice mail for him in a lowered voice. Were gonna string you up by a dreadlock, man, and light you on fire, she says.

The campus plotline in Sennas novel reminded me of a moment in Justin Simiens Dear White People , a somewhat platitudinal film that also takes on self-serious young people who are newly, and superficially, occupying their racial identities. In Simiens film, the biracial heroine, Sam White, initiates a campus-wide panic after posing as a member of a campus organization and sending out an e-mail invitation to a blackface party. The incident in New People similarly escalates: Jesse Jackson comes to their college, telling the young brother to keep hope alive. But unlike Sam Whites prank, which is at least intended to spur her peers to actionand which she later comes to regretMarias appears meaningless. Khalil never finds out that it was Maria who left the message, and she never tells him. Instead, we learn, he makes slow, solemn revolutionary love to her. For Senna, identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.

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Danzy Senna's New Black Woman - The New Yorker