New People: A Novel

By Danzy Senna

Riverhead Books, £12.99

Reviewed by Lesley McDowell

SINCE her first novel, Caucasia, in 1998, Danzy Senna has focused relentlessly on the question of identity from the point of view of a young bi-racial woman in the US. This is a reflection of her own story as the daughter of an Afro-Mexican poet and a white Bostonian activist and writer. We might say "relentlessly" because it’s a question she’s forever trying to answer; and we might say "relentlessly" because the pull of that question haunts the reader, too, long after the book is laid down.

New People is set towards the end of the 20th century in Brooklyn. It’s significant that Senna has located it pre-9/11, before "everything changed", perhaps; this is the moment, she implies, when mixed couples became the "thing", to be featured in endless magazine articles, photogenic and smiling, celebrating the breaking down of race and class barriers. The fluidity of identity is a joyous thing, this era of the final years of the Clinton presidency, will say.

And so we have that highly desirable couple that endorses the mix of the new: Maria, who is the adopted daughter of a black woman activist yet pale enough to "pass" for white, and Khalil, who is Jewish and whose sister Lisa, likes to adopt black or African looks in her fashion choices. They met young, in their 20s, and are now getting married. "Khalil says they make each other complete. Their skin is the same shade of beige. Together, they look like the end of a story."

Khalil’s looking for a future in the dot com business, and Maria is researching for a dissertation on the Jonestown massacre, the real-life largest mass suicide that took place in a Christian sect run by American Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978. Almost 1,000 people died in that incident. Maria is focusing on the music that the inhabitants of Jonestown made, and wants to argue that their music was a kind of resistance to their leader, who would ultimately persuade them all to kill themselves.

But her focus is going astray: she has become obsessed with a poet she doesn’t name, but who haunts her every waking moment, as well as her dreams. And it’s this dreamlike quality that dominates the following sequence of events, as coincidence and unlikelihood pile upon each other to let Maria, ghostlike, simply flow through them all, as though she has no will of her own.

And yet, like the people in Jonestown, she does have a will of her own. Like them, she might be being led to some kind of suicidal impulse, but she can make choices. She can choose, for example, not to try and find out where the poet lives, and not to go to his apartment. When the poet’s neighbour, a harassed young white woman called Susan, appears with a Chinese baby in her arms, and mistakes Maria for the hired Latino help, Maria can choose to own up to who she is. But she doesn’t; she goes along with the pretence. She listens to Susan complain about the married man she’s having an affair with; she massages Susan’s feet when she complains that she’s tired; she fetches Susan a drink.

She does all this after Susan has returned from her appointment and Maria has, in her absence, slipped out on to the fire escape and let herself into the poet’s empty apartment, looking round his things. She’s already crossed a line, and when the poet turns up later at Lisa’s birthday meal (because it turns out that Lisa and Khalil both know him), the force of coincidence renders Maria almost powerless.

There is an undercurrent of the theme of power running through this sensitive, highly readable tale: who has the most power in a racially mixed couple? It’s tempting to argue that Maria, who can easily be mistaken for a maid because the privileged white woman in the apartment doesn’t bother looking closely enough at the hired help, even though she "passes" for white, has less power and that her chasing of the poet is somehow her way of trying to acquire more than her Jewish fiancé has.

Senna’s dreamlike story, though, has all the necessary realism to make it disconcertingly believable. Maria herself displays the kind of inner despair that comes from the realisation that "fluidity" has its own limits and borderlines, too, ones that are both visible as well as invisible. Never again will you feel quite so comfortable in your own skin; nor, as Senna shows, should you.