New People
Danzy Senna, 2017
Penguin Publishing
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487095
Summary
A subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America.
As the 20th century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible.
She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre.
They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about "new people" like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns.
Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her—yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria's perfect new life but her very persona.
Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Raised—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., University of California-Irvine
• Awards—Whiting Writers' Award; Dos Passos Prize
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Danzy Senna is an American novelist, born to two writers: her father, Carl Senna, is an Afro-Mexican poet and author, and her mother, Fanny Howe, an Irish-American writer. The family settled in Boston, Massachusetts, but the couple eventually underwent, as Danzy describes it, a "terrible divorce" that "affected me and my siblings quite profoundly." She wrote about her family history in her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
Senna recevied her B.A. from Stanford University and an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. There, she received several creative writing awards.
Her three novels — Caucasia (1998), Symptomatic (2004), and New People (2017) — all feature a view of society from a biracial perspective. The eight stories collected in You Are Free (2011) also deal with the intersection of race, family, and friendship.
Senna's books have been well received, gaining recognition from Book of the Month Club and American Library Association. In 2002, she received the Whiting Writers Award and in 2004 was named a Fellow for the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She has also been nominated for the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Danzy Senna lives in Los Angeles with her husband, writer Percival Everett, and their son. (Adapted from Wikipedia and bitchmedia. Retrieved 8/21/2017.)
Book Reviews
The frankness with which New People treats race as a kind of public performance is both uncomfortable and strangely cathartic.… Provocative.
Wall Street Journal
It says a great deal for New People—Danzy Senna’s martini-dry, espresso-dark comedy of contemporary manners — that its compound of caustic observations and shrewd characterizations could only have emerged from a writer as finely tuned to her social milieu as [Jane] Austen was to hers.… [A]rtfully strewn with excruciating and uproarious misperceptions…[New People] doesn’t pour cold water on one’s expectations for a better, more tolerant world. In fact, it implies that world has, to a great extent, already arrived.
Newsday
Slick and highly enjoyable.… Thrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Senna’s work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity.… Identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.
New Yorker
Compellingly provocative.… [Senna] creat[es] a dense psychological portrait of a black woman nearing the close of the 20th century: inquisitive, obsessive, imaginative, alive.
New Republic
An of-the-moment novel [that] tackles identity and infatuation…slender but powerful, as seductive and urgent as a phone call from an old flame. At first blush, the book seems like a straightforward love story…but it’s more complicated than that.… This is not a book about race disguised as a romance, nor is it a love story saddled with a moral. Senna’s achievement is that she interlaces both threads in one ingenious tale.
Oprah Magazine
Danzy Senna bores into the dynamics of race, identity, heritage, poverty, and privilege in contemporary America.… Agile and ambitious, the novel is also a wild-hearted romance about secrets and obsessions, a dramedy of manners about educated middle-class blacks — the talented tenth — that is Senna’s authorial home ground.
Elle
In many ways, lines of color, alongside the complexities of what it means to pass as one thing or another, may be what best defines Danzy Senna’s epochal — in its most literal sense — new novel.… [It] is a paean to the psychosocial complexities of being racially mixed, and, as a result, color-lines, passing, and double-consciousness are everywhere.… The novel’s ultimate message seems, however, to be one both true and unsettling, if unsurprising: that color-lines have never left America and likely never will.
Los Angeles Review of Books
A darkly comic novel about race, about false utopias, and about the fine line between seemingly innocuous, everyday groupthink—the kind that’s the price of admission for being part of a marriage, or a band of friends, or a tribe of any sort.… Senna writes beautifully about the complexity of identity, the intersection of racial consciousness, and class awareness, and individual perspective.
Vogue
Set in the Rodney King-era ‘90s, New People is as mesmerizingly fast-paced as it is deeply reflective of monumental truths that resonate perhaps even more powerfully two decades in the future.
Harper’s Bazaar
[A] muddled third novel featuring a protagonist in search of her identity.… [D]iscussions about racism and white privilege…and a side plot involving Maria’s attempts to finish her dissertation…. Significant themes and issues…unfortunately get lost before fully landing.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [W]ell-constructed, brooding novel.… [A] great read, both compelling and thoughtful …[with] a page-turning urgency…. Maria tumbles toward a disaster of her own making, while her musings on race shift between provocative and cynical. —Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
Senna’s meditation on 1996 America and its false sense of progress is an eerie picture of society today, too. With a dark sense of humor, Senna builds her story with a horror-like tension that releases with a tongue-in-cheek sigh. Sure to keep readers riding white-knuckled to the end.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Senna's fearless novel is equal parts beguiling and disturbing.… Every detail and subplot, including Maria's dissertation on the Jonestown massacre and her buried secret about a college prank gone awry, is resonant. A great book about race and a great book all around.!!!
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for New People … than take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Maria Pierce? As her mother observed of her twenty-odd years ago, while Maria was still in her crib, "She's perfectly cheerful, but I sense a coldness." Is that an accurate prediction of her 27 years later? What other characteristics do you find in her? Do you find her a sympathetic character? Does your attitude toward her change over the course of the novel?
2. Khalil, Maria's fiance, is the love of her life. Or is he? "He is the one she needs, the one who can repair her." What does that sentence mean … and what might the words (especially the last two, "repair her") harbinger for their relationship?
3. Maria and Khalil are named the Prom King and Queen Racially Nebulous Prom. Care to comment?
4. Talk about Maria's attraction to the tall, black poet. What is the pull he exudes toward her? Is it, as she herself wonders, the desire for "authenticity" or for something "real" that she's not finding in her own life? And why is he unnamed — why only ever referred to as "the poet"?
5. What do you think of the students at Stanford, their "Recovering Racist" pins and lobbing off their "colonized hair." How would you describe those gestures: genuinely supportive, empty, kind-hearted, over-the-top?
6. Discuss the racist phone prank Maria plays on Khalil and its repercussions.
7. What is the state of race relations in society at the time of this book? Are racial identity and acceptance in the '90s different from how they are today? Consider, for example, the white woman who mistakes Maria for her nanny. Funny? Maddening?
8. Maria's Ph.D. dissertation is on the Jonestown Massacre. What do you know about that event? And what does that event — its rhetoric of racial liberation and left-wing politics — have to do with the overall thematic concerns of Danzy Senna's novel?
9. Talk about the way in which the novel ends — with Maria left in a precarious position. Are you satisfied with that ending, or would you have preferred a different one?
10. Discuss the title of the book. What does it mean to be "new people"?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)