The image of Black wealth is relatively neglected in American popular culture — we have our finance CEOs, overbearing white matriarchs, and “Crazy Rich Asians”, but the foremost image that comes to mind of someone Black luxuriating is likely Beyoncé for her RENAISSANCE tour, or maybe Oprah’s empire. A lack of diversity here is troubling, but at least in Great Black Hope, Rob Franklin’s debut novel, we have a Black protagonist able to hide behind his finances, even when he slips.
Much like last year’s titular curmudgeon in Allen Bratton’s Henry Henry, Great Black Hope centers Smith, a queer Black Stanford grad from an affluent family who gets arrested in the Hamptons for cocaine possession at the end of summer. The ordeal is less of a life-shattering situation and more of an eyeroll for Smith. He worries about liquidating his Roth IRA to pay for a lawyer, but the family has got it covered. He still heads into work at a startup named CNVS, gets drunk at restaurant openings, and has coffee with friends, all while attending AA meetings.
His parents’ wealth reveals itself over time. His father is a professor and president of a Georgian college, now a preacher and lecturer at Emory; his mother is a doctor. As a lawyer, his grandmother worked hard just for her adversaries to slather her with adjectives: “Gale had been Black all her life, had gotten bitch more times than she cared to count, but rich was a new one.” His parents commissioned austere, gilded-framed portraits of themselves in their often-soirée’d home; the family has met President Obama. Suffice to say, they weren’t thrilled at his arrest (his mother collapses), but he faces little repercussions or anxiety, apart from some awkward joint phone calls to lawyers.
Likewise, the depths of Smith’s addiction opens itself up. Whereas his cocaine-fueled night was described as a “blip” in Great Black Hope’s opening words, he grew more attached to the drug in college when he met Elle, the daughter of a famous singer, who became addicted after getting pushed out of her job as a magazine photographer. He doesn’t have a lot of trouble staying away from the stuff while he’s in recovery, but the incident opens his memory to nights “blacking out at some tweaker’s apartment”. Cocaine is much more than a “blip”, it seems.
Drugs, Franklin writes, prolonged a party, “quieted that nagging, that warning, that nothing lasts”, which is implicit. It’s reminiscent of another insight dressed up to be more meaningful than it is: “Once [Smith had] gotten the grade, the role, the letter, he stared at the vacuity innate to getting whatever it is one most desires.” Join the club.
His scrappy lawyer gets a deal — a couple of sessions with the aging Dr. Mancini, a few months sober — and he’s off the hook. All Smith has to do for the brunt of Great Black Hope is endure, which is harder than it seems. Elle, now his roommate, is found dead after a night out, her body flung in the East River, the case still unresolved. Another friend, the erratic Carolyn, breaks up a chef’s marriage; he storms to her house once, begging to be let in.
Smith is more viewer than instigator to these dramas; he moves gently through the plot, too calmly for his situation. He goes through real, distressing events — the death of a roommate, his court hearing, back home in limbo — and he takes it with a shrug, or at least, with little action. It’s fine for a character with means to be a little low-energy, but he veers close to bland.
Some of Great Black Hope‘s intelligent (if a little tacit) commentary is thrown out, rather than explored; theories that most readers of literary fiction already understand. One of Smith’s friends, O, “had so much more reason, or right, to rail against a system that rewarded privilege and exacted punishment along lines drawn at birth, to grasp that intricate knot of guilt, grief, and anger that Smith was still trying to untwine.”
During a police altercation, “Most [passerby] had their phones upraised, as they’d been taught to, having seen the supercut of Black bodies on the news and learned that it was their role in these dramas to witness.” Franklin gestures at these ideas so briefly that his sentences have the feeling of meaningful discussion, but little of the content; often, Great Black Hope reads like an Instagram infographic. bell hooks is mentioned no less than four times.
“Of course, he thought, Black pain was always spectacle, was always entertainment. In viral videos and abstract paintings, in policy, medicine, and history, their humanity was so incidental as to be revoked at will — their bodies inseparable from their capacity to suffer, and bear it spiraling.” Undoubtedly true, and this raises interesting ideas, but rather than use the novel to dig into these complexities, they’re spelled out plainly. A reader can deduce, for instance, the difference between how his white and Black friends end up, both under the influence of cocaine; a California wellness retreat and death, respectively.
At its most gripping, Great Black Hope investigates these ideas head-on rather than gesturing at them. Nia, Smith’s sister, is (reasonably) shaken after learning her grandfather rented apartments to vulnerable people — a “slumlord”, she calls him. “It’s easy to spout big words when you grew up silver-spooned, but the fact is, you wouldn’t be where you are without those apartments,” her aunt says. Nia sees her point.
When O’s friend Tia disrupts a couple of cops badgering a sleeping homeless person, O intervenes subserviently and calmly. Tia’s upset she wasn’t allowed to instigate — “politically, morally, you’re right,” O concedes, “But being right’s never stopped a bullet.” Tia takes her time. “Best weapon they got,” she says, “it’s not a nightstick or a gun, it’s your fucking fear.” These are intricate, worthwhile conversations about the intersections between race, class, and guilt, even if, in Great Black Hope, they have the cadence of an HBO drama.
Franklin can be cuttingly funny, but fleetingly so. An aunt’s “love language had always been complaint”. College was full of “grease-haired bohemians who refused beef but took peyote”. or “bell hooks beliebers opining hazily.” A pompous visual artist is “the sort to whom culture writers referred when they spoke of Afrofuturists: the deep-Brooklyn-dwelling, jewel-tone-wearing, natural-hair-having beneficiaries of the Solange industrial complex.”
When Dr. Mancini raises a curious eye, asking if his father is around around, Smith infers the doctor had “seen the trailer for Moonlight, he knew all about this.” Such sharp thoughts are fitting for a writer who thanks both Joan Didion and Charli xcx in his acknowledgements, and for a character who bonds with a boyfriend over Ben Lerner and the National.
Franklin is certainly a beautiful stylist, but often his sentences feel like they’re trying very hard to make you think so. Smith rides the train in Midtown, “where suits emerged from their gray-slat towers like tidal waves of minnows, their manic lunch-break motion some brief reprieve, though paced still to the demands of production.”
“[Addiction] was a quality he had never read as a lack,” he writes in another noble passage, “the product of some interior erosion and essentially bankrupt condition, but someone else entirely: a desire inescapable, and often ruinous to those who possess it, to scrape with fanged nails against the marbled flesh of being — arriving finally at bone marrow.” Yes, this is talented writing, but it’s also somewhat exhausting. Sometimes his point is only to be beautiful, in lieu of meaning: Identity was “a kind of animal trap, useful only if one was deft enough to claim the bait without tripping the door to the cage.”
The momentum Great Black Hope starts with, the idea that Smith is usually protected because of his family, but not because of his race, and the far-reaching corners of addiction, all but fizzles out in its last few pages, save for a different friend’s disappearance. It ends with a party, some general comments on life’s beauty, how these sorts of novels usually do, all golden sunlight and humming cicadas. Two friends embracing fills Smith with his strongest emotion yet, “unbearable tenderness”, which seems an accurate descriptor for Great Black Hope as a whole.