GREAT BLACK HOPE, by Rob Franklin
The sentences in Rob Franklin’s strong debut novel, “Great Black Hope,” have a curious way of expanding to fit ever more jokes. One character wears “an oversize blazer she’d ‘borrowed’ from her boss — and indeed looked a bit like a mom, or a mum, as she called it, though more of the Paltrow-brownstone variety, minder of a bespectacled toddler named Timbre.” Another “had celebrity teeth, meaning fake, too big and too white — which gave him the amusing appearance of a man transforming into a horse — and a big belly veiled barely by a vintage Fear T-shirt.” Rarely do characters appear without a litany of cutting descriptions.
“Great Black Hope” follows David Smith, a queer 25-year-old from a Black bourgeois family in Atlanta and raised among a “cohort of prep-school Negroes.” At the start of the novel, Smith is reeling. His friend and roommate, Elle, was recently found dead from an overdose in a Bronx park. And he has just been arrested after the police caught him in the Hamptons with less than a gram of cocaine. As Smith attends court dates with increasing anxiety (and sometimes hilarity, at least for the reader), tabloids speculate about Elle’s death and print racist and sexist portraits of her life.
Much of the book’s suspense comes from its attention to the traps awaiting people of color in the courts. Franklin briefly turns to Smith’s grandmother Gale, who, after her cousin is lynched in the 1940s, becomes a lawyer “to protect the ones she loved” — only to witness discriminatory sentencing for drug cases swell Black prison populations by the 1980s. That history throws into question whether her own grandson will beat his case, and reminds us that the law has never been kind to Black people charged with drug offenses.
As Smith struggles to find stability and investigations into Elle’s death continue, Franklin’s humor darkens but doesn’t fade. In the courtroom, Smith’s name and crime are announced as if the case were “an item up for auction.” When asking about Smith’s drug history, his mother speaks “with Shonda Rhimesian drama.”
Especially funny is the novel’s satire of coerced therapy. To land a good plea deal, Smith sees a counselor, who thinks Smith’s drug usage derives from parental neglect and views him as little more than a stereotype: “the gay Black boy with the absentee father.” The joke is that his father is very much present and involved, still happily married to Smith’s mother, and a former university president. But Smith pretends to fit the description to satisfy his counselor in the hopes of minimizing his sentencing.
Smith similarly begins attending 12-step meetings. He finds that the program’s framework and mantras, like “one was too many and a thousand never enough,” don’t quite fit. He can stop after one drink, he insists, even if we are not so sure. At every juncture, whether in counseling or in court, a predetermined narrative follows him: “For those who looked like them,” Franklin writes, the word “addict” is “a moral failure, a confirmation of society’s worst fears. A forfeit of all the tenuous advantages given.” The problem for Smith is not only that he’s been arrested but also that he can be seen only through a reductive, problematic lens.
These questions of representation evoke many of the novel’s wide-ranging influences. “Great Black Hope” alludes to canonical queer novelists like Marcel Proust, Christopher Isherwood and James Baldwin. When Smith goes home, he reads Black thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon and bell hooks. Elsewhere, Franklin name-checks artists from Bertolt Brecht to Nicki Minaj. The varied references also signal the author’s genre-bending: The book is part elegy, addiction narrative, mystery, queer coming-of-age story and novel of manners.
But in all of these registers, even in its downcast moments, “Great Black Hope” retains its comic edge, exposing the absurdity and tragedy of American race and gender relations. It will make many readers laugh through tears, and they won’t know which reaction came first.
GREAT BLACK HOPE | By Rob Franklin | Summit Books | 309 pp. | $28.99
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