AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
We first meet David Smith Jr., simply known as Smith, in a nightclub in the Hamptons. But the party is about to come to a quick end.
ROB FRANKLIN: (Reading) Picture him stumbling. Six feet and 3 inches, He towered like a tree, bark brown and quietly handsome. Picture him crouched in a corner as he snorts from a key, the metallic taste of his tongue. The night gleamed back into clarity as he steadied himself to return when, out of the crowd, two men emerged, stern-eyed and square-jawed, barking orders he could barely discern. Calmly, he followed. He didn't wish to make a scene, out through a side exit and onto the street, silent but for the bass of a bop that had reigned on the charts all summer.
RASCOE: That's Rob Franklin, reading about Smith's arrest for cocaine possession from his debut novel, "Great Black Hope." It's a study of a young Black, queer, privileged man who's floated through the high society scene of his richer white friends until his roommate is found dead, presumably from tainted drugs. And that, Rob Franklin says, is when Smith began to spiral.
FRANKLIN: He's a character who's kind of running from his feelings a bit. Like, I don't think he wants to kind of look directly at his feelings of rage, of sadness, of hurt, of guilt. He's not somebody who's, like, totally in touch with those, in part because of the kind of, like, image he's always been expected to project.
RASCOE: Where did the idea for this novel come from?
FRANKLIN: So I started writing this novel the day before my 26th birthday in Atlanta, back in my childhood bedroom, just kind of thinking a lot about family expectations and kind of how different my life looked from the life I think my parents envisioned for me. I sat down and just wrote, like, 10 pages of material that's actually no longer in the novel but was kind of a character sketch of this protagonist, Smith, who, like me, lived a life split between worlds, the sort of Southern Black bourgeoisie upbringing of his parents and the downtown New York club scene. I put it away for years, and as I kind of revisited these pages, I really, like, zeroed in on the subject of addiction as a way to probe larger concerns around Black respectability politics and really the question of, like, the different cultural weight of the word addict when applied to different bodies.
RASCOE: Talk to me about these different worlds that Smith seems to operate in. I mean, because, you know, as you mentioned, I guess there's that Southern bourgeoisie - then there's this kind of high-class New York party scene, with party drugs and heavy drinking. Then he's kind of in this highbrow art world where he works. But in all of these places, Smith seems to be set apart. Why is that?
FRANKLIN: Yeah. I mean, I think that's such an astute observation. His parents are professionals. They're academics and doctors. He's very much reared in a sort of - a school of respectability, achievement, being twice as good to get half as far. And in New York, he exists in this slightly different world where his two friends, Carolyn and Elle, are kind of almost his, like, entry point into this East Coast, implicitly white world that he's sort of enamored by, but he also feels like he's at the margins of. He knows that his, like, presence in those rooms is conditional.
RASCOE: Why do you say that his presence is conditional?
FRANKLIN: There's an idea - in one of the first scenes, he goes with his friend Carolyn, to a restaurant opening. As he's kind of interacting with some of Carolyn's friends, his appeal to them is in part that he adds a kind of texture to their lives. He knows that being, quote-unquote, "wealthy and white" of late had become unfashionable, at least without the veneer of multiculturalism.
RASCOE: When you look at his family, as you said, they're very prestigious. And in addition to trying to, like, fit in with these very high-class New York people, like, there's a family element to this and a family legacy and, I guess, burden on him.
FRANKLIN: Absolutely. I think burden is the right word. In "Great Black Hope," we see three generations of Smith's family. So we see his grandmother, who, in a flashback scene, we discovered that she grew up on a sharecropping farm and becomes a lawyer, and then we see Smith's parents' generation, who then go to Ivy League schools. And then Smith is the sort of third generation of this class ascendancy. And with him, I mean, I really wanted to capture the idea that generations of uphill climbing and upward mobility can essentially be undone in a single night for people in this kind of precarious race-class intersection.
RASCOE: You know, Black people in this country - where there is social mobility, we're also much more likely to fall back, right?
FRANKLIN: Yeah, for sure.
RASCOE: Like, it's very tenuous. Do you think part of this is, like, this idea, like - well, your grandparents had to deal with sharecropping. Your struggle is going to high-class parties in New York. You know, may - do you have too much time on your hands? Not to simplify the problems, but...
FRANKLIN: Totally.
RASCOE: ...You know?
(LAUGHTER)
RASCOE: I mean...
FRANKLIN: No, I mean, there's an aspect of that, for sure. I think there's a long tradition of, like, bored rich kids in the canon of white literature.
RASCOE: (Laughter) Yeah.
FRANKLIN: Like, the sad rich girl, kind of Daisy Buchanan-type characters in literary history - and part of this project was looking at a kind of Black character who has that sort of melancholy that can be born from a degree of privilege. But also, like, he's certainly not up against sharecropping, but he is up against feeling like he has to perform himself always and how exhausting that can become and also just like a lack of real community. I think he's a character that does, partially for good reason, feel very misunderstood in a lot of these spaces he's moving through.
RASCOE: It is a complicated story, and there are times where it can be hard to be entirely sympathetic to him because as we said, his family has money. He has access to redemption that maybe other people don't, right? Is this a story really about a young man coming to terms with everything that he has going for him without throwing it all away?
FRANKLIN: Without spoiling anything (laughter), there is a more kind of dramatic structure of his postarrest narrative. Things continue to get worse, essentially, and, like, you know, it ends up with him in a prison cell or something. And we know that that is the case for many, many thousands of Black men in America, and that is the history of the war on drugs. Part of the political commentary of the book definitely is looking at how Smith is insulated by his class privilege, and that allows him this almost, like, blase attitude as regards, like, recovery. He can kind of sit in those rooms and sort of feel like he's, like, gaming his way through it and questioning if he even belongs there.
RASCOE: The title of the book is "Great Black Hope." What do you think for Smith would be him living out a life that fulfills his hope?
FRANKLIN: You know, when I gave the book that title, I thought of it as, like, tongue in cheek. I was definitely, like, thinking of the kind of illustrious Black figures who people have applied that phrase to, like Barack Obama Condoleezza Rice. Because we do end on this slightly more hopeful note, I think his hope is now that a lot of his illusions about the world have been stripped away, and he's rebuilding a life that has a more overtly political valence where he's really aware of his privilege and, like, doing something about it. In the most hopeful future for Smith, he's chasing after a thing he actually desires now that he's closer to understanding what that is.
RASCOE: That's Rob Franklin. His debut novel is "Great Black Hope." Thank you so much for talking with us about it.
FRANKLIN: Thank you so much for having me.
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