When it opens, Rob Franklin’s debut novel Great Black Hope feels like just another one of those books skewering the American elite and their dissolute New York lives. The types of books that Americans have been doing since Henry James and Edith Wharton and that have seen modern counterparts in authors like Taffy Brodesser-Ackner and Jean Hanff Korelitz. But while Rob Franklin has no trouble with this aspect of his novel, he quickly moves on to other, broader themes and concerns, and in particular what it means to be Black in modern America.
When Great Black Hope opens, (David) Smith is being arrested at a party in the Hamptons for drug possession. Smith comes from an upper middle-class family and they rally round to find him a lawyer. Smith takes the opportunity to come out from under an addiction that began long before but has worsened in the few months since the unsolved murder of his flatmate Elle. Franklin goes on to dig deeply into Smith’s life but along the way the lives of his parents (who are both professionals living in Atlanta) and grandmother (one of the earliest Black lawyers and still practicing in Texas).
As already noted there is plenty of skewering here of the New York party scene. Smith’s history with Elle and his other good friend Carolyn, also a recovering addict, take him to all night parties, exclusive clubs and celebrity chef dinners. But Great Black Hope is much more than this, Franklin considers a much broader range of issues faced by Black (and gay and transgender) communities in modern America including the pervasive broad stereotyping of their lives and experiences. And he does this not just through Smith himself but through his family and their connections, and all the people that he interacts with be it the Black detective assigned to Elle’s case, or the Black artist he meets and who goes out to provide support the homeless.
The title itself is a signpost to the irony and the challenge that Franklin is exploring. Smith’s grandmother was a trailblazer and his parents have fashioned upper-middle class comfortable lives in Atlanta. Smith is in some ways their “hope”, the third generation who wants for nothing as a result of their hard work. While he in some ways represents their success, Smith is also drifting, working for a New York start-up, unsure what to do with his life, recovering from addiction. But despite any irony there is also a thread of real hope here, both in Smith’s story but also in the stories of some of those he encounters.
Great Black Hope draws on a tradition of American writing that has mainly focussed on the white upper classes. But it also draws on Franklin’s own life experience. Franklin manages to refract and recontextualise the themes and tropes of those novels through the lens of the his experience and the experiences of the Black community in America more broadly, creating a very different type of narrative. And in doing so he delivers an insightful, affecting novel. And an incredibly assured debut.
Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin
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