← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Rob Franklin's Debut Novel 'Great Black Hope'
00:18:13
The new novel Great Black Hope follows a wealthy Black Stanford graduate, who discovers that his class can only protect him so much after he is arrested for cocaine possession.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. A new debut novel reveals the hidden dangers of New York's elite party scene for a black queer man. It's titled Great Black Hope. The novel opens with a drug bust at a Hamptons nightclub. Stanford graduate David Smith Jr. Is in custody now facing a felony for cocaine possession. After celebrating his friend El's 25th birthday between his impending trial and Elle's mysterious death that night, Smith spirals with thoughts about his reputation, his relationship to drugs and the possibility of losing a future his parents worked so hard to preserve. Great Black Hope is out today. Vogue magazine lists it as one of its best books of 2025 so far, saying, quote, at its core, the book is a study of privilege, class, race, beauty, youth, intellect, fame and how those advantages intersect, contradict and ultimately fail to protect from human tragedy. Rob Franklin is the author. He has an event tonight at 7pm at the Public Hotel with McNally Jackson Books. And then Rob will be in conversation with author roxane gay Wednesday, June 25 at Harlem School of the Arts on St. Nicholas Avenue. But he's across from me right now in studio. Happy publication day.
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Rob Franklin
Thank you so much, Alison.
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David Smith
Thank you for having me.
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Alison Stewart
So you started writing this novel this the day before your 26th birthday?
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Rob Franklin
Yes, that's correct.
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Alison Stewart
So what were you grappling with? What were you thinking about as you sat down to write this novel?
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David Smith
Yeah, so as you said, I started this when I was 25, about to turn 26, and I was sitting at my parents kitchen table in Atlanta home for a month before moving to Berlin to pursue writing full time for the first time. And just like back in my childhood bedroom, kind of thinking a lot about familial expectations and I think really how different my life looked from the life I think my parents had anticipated for me or planned for me. And without any real agenda in mind, I sat down and wrote like 10 pages of material that's actually no longer in the book but just a character sketch of this protagonist Smith, who like me lived this life split between like the Southern black bourgeoisie world of his parents and then the kind of downtown New York club scene. And as I kept writing, I really wanted to focus in on the subject of drug use and addiction as a way to probe these larger questions around black respectability politics and really the different cultural weight of the word addict when applied to different bodies.
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Alison Stewart
In those 10 pages that you wrote, what emerged. What emerged about this protagonist, Smith, that you didn't. You didn't really know when you sat down to write it, but it's like, oh, wow. Oh, wow, this is coming out.
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David Smith
Yeah. I mean, I think I was really interested in. You know, we think of a preoccupation with achievement or respectability, external image, in some ways as a positive thing. You know, these are things that Smith was kind of schooled in from a young age. But I was really interested in the way that that can become almost like a kind of cancer in people's lives. And particularly, I think, for the sort of black upper middle class milieu that Smith is a part of that's up against and kind of actively working against a lot of projections being placed upon them.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah. What's the old saying? You have the three generations, you sow it, you grow it, and the third generation blows it.
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David Smith
Okay. I mean, we definitely have that dynamic. I actually am not familiar with that phrase. But we have that at play in Great Black Hope because we see three generations of Smith's family. One see his grandmother, who, we learn in a flashback, grew up on sharecropping farm and becomes kind of one of the first black women lawyers in Texas. Then we see his parents generation, who, you know, are the. The products of that first generation's hard, hard work and labor, go on to Ivy League colleges and become professionals and do kind of the safe but, like, very upwardly mobile path of becoming doctors and lawyers. And then we see Smith's generation. And something I really wanted to capture was how decades and generations of that kind of uphill climb, that labor, can be undone in a single night.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is Rob Franklin. The name of his book is Great Black Hope. It is out today. I'm gonna ask you to read the introduction for us. Can you set this up for us?
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Rob Franklin
Absolutely. So it doesn't need a ton of intro. Because we're right. We're right at the beginning.
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David Smith
Yeah. Okay.
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Rob Franklin
In the grand scheme of history, it was nothing. A blip, a breath. The time it took Smith to pocket what might have looked like a matchbook or stick of gum to an unwitting child, but was, in fact 0.7 grams of powdered Colombian cocaine flown in from Medellin, cut with amphetamine in Miami, and offered to him in Southampton by a boy whom he knew from nights out in the city, 0.7 grams heavier. He he loped back through the crush of rhythmless elbows and cloying perfume which wafted up and dissolved in the damp and sultry night, the very last of summer. Looking around, he realized it was really just a restaurant. By the front door at least 50 people huddled, breathing down each other's necks as they shouted names they hoped would capture the doorman's attention, while in the backyard were hundreds more, dozens of tables now shook with the weight of dancing bodies, lit with the particular mania reserved for the end of east coast summers when one becomes aware of the changing season, the coming cold. But for now it was silk and linen, the expensive musk of strangers. Every face appeared familiar, some because he actually knew them, while others only bore a sun tanned resemblance, the pleasing symmetry of the rich. These were the faces which seemed to populate the whole of his young life, colleagues in one night stands from the clubs called Cool Downtown. These faces had appeared at bars, brunches, birthdays, holiday soirees, which black tie was optional, and before New York and freshman seminars and frat parties and before that on teen tours or tennis camps where they'd been acne spotted, their original forms intact. And here they'd all come, every one of them, to escape the inhospitable heat of Manhattan and enjoy a seaside breeze. Picture him stumbling, six feet and three 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 base of a bop that had rained on the charts all summer. Here is where the night splits open along its tight stitched seam, the realization arriving at a tanned vehicle marked Southampton Police, that these men, khaki polos, were not the club security he'd assumed at first they were. The night bled cereally. Smith watched himself be searched as if from a perch above, watched his limbs grow limp and pliant as they bent behind his back. The rotated view of girls in wedges, their clothes wrong, the stars wrong. Yes, the greater sense was not of shock but unreality. All of this was staged, a prank, a punk, the actors in the front seat too handsome to be cops. The men were swift and Practiced. After he'd handed over $500 cash from an ATM upstairs at the station, they brought him down to be printed, ID'd and photographed. They were done in 20 minutes, after which he was handed a paper slip and his things in a plastic bag, then sent back into the wounded night. He called an Uber. On the curb, Smith watched phosphians blinker in the darkness, a chorus of cameras flashing. He'd worn in his mugshot a vintage Marnie Gingham shirt, loose fit linen trousers, and a gently startled expression.
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Alison Stewart
That's Rob Franklin reading from his book, Great Black Hope. They were done in 20 minutes. What happens to his world? Not just his world, his parents world. In 20 minutes.
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David Smith
Yeah, you know, before I was saying all of that generational mobility can be undone in a single night. But yeah, that line, in essence, it's undone in 20 minutes. And we see, I think in that passage that for the cops this is just another night. This is kind of procedural. Um, you know, often they're, they're trying to make quotas before the end of the month or the end of the summer. Um, but yeah, for Smith and for his family, it's. It's catastrophic.
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Alison Stewart
I'm wondering, it's a beautifully written page and a half that had to go through a serious amount of editing. What was the editing process like for you? Because you're, you write in a very beautiful poetic style. I'm curious what the editing process was like for you.
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David Smith
Yeah, so actually, this opening, I think, I mean, it definitely went through a ton of editing and a bunch of rewrites, but it is one of the pieces of the book that has survived pretty much from the first draft. This sort of like almost prose poem opening, which is, I kind of think, in a different voice than much of the rest of the novel. I liked the idea of setting it apart formally from the kind of narrative voice of a lot of the rest of the novel.
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Alison Stewart
We are talking with Rob Franklin. His book Great Black Hope is out today. We'll have more after a quick break. This is all of it. You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We're discussing a debut novel that follows a young black queer professional as he navigates New York City's elite social circle and party scene, which leads him to having some trouble with the law. It's written by Rob Franklin. He's joining me in studio to discuss his new book, Great Black Hope. So Smith, he gets in trouble, and this is what I thought was really interesting. He sort of, he decides to his parents, decide to interview several lawyers. How does he decide which lawyer to go with?
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David Smith
Yeah, so in an early chapter, we see the Smith family. Smith is his last name, but he also goes by. It has a first name, David Smith. And so we see the Smith family interviewing a couple different lawyers. And one is, in some ways very aligned with kind of them culturally. One of the lawyers is a Howard graduate and a graduate of Harvard Law and is a kind of. Yeah, a member of the black bourgeoisie who understands the sort of emotional weight that this arrest has for the family and promises to really fight for Smith. And then the other one is a local lawyer, is a lawyer in the Hamptons who says he knows kind of all of the people, people involved, and has a really different. A really different pitch. It's. It's less of a hard pitch, but ultimately one that they see the value in because they. They know the value of network and how things work in these kind of small, elite towns.
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Alison Stewart
What facet of. Of the criminal justice system did you want to explore through Smith?
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David Smith
Yeah, I mean, I was really interested in the sort of history of. And changing frontier of the war on drugs and how Smith's class privilege ultimately, like, insulates him in many ways from the kind of realities that fall, as we know so many other black men who are caught up in the criminal justice system. And so in the book, we get through this through Smith's grandmother to look at some kind of ephemera from the history of the war on drugs. We look at Nancy Reagan's Just say no campaign. We look at the basketball player Lynn Bias. And in all of the kind of, like, almost cultural detritus around narratives of black bodies and addiction that have fed into a kind of policy framework within the War on drugs. And then we also look at the kind of changing current landscape amid the opiate crisis, but all through kind of character and scene that was important to me, of course.
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Alison Stewart
Well, why was that more important to you?
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David Smith
Yeah, I mean, I think I knew when I was writing this that it was in some ways a political novel. And I was excited about that as a prospect. But through a lot of, like, back and forth with my agents, with my.
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Rob Franklin
Editors, with peers in my MFA program.
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David Smith
With my thesis advisor, I cut back a lot of the more kind of, like, didactic, like, essayistic type things where it was, like me, the author wants.
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Rob Franklin
Wants to say, yes, you know, this.
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David Smith
Where it's like, okay, just write an essay collection. And so pared back a lot of that and was able to embed some of Those ideas into. Into Smith walking around his landscape, walking around New York and observing things and. Yeah, kind of navigating that through character and through, you know, in scene narrative, rather than just through kind of like interior, essayistic prose.
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Alison Stewart
How does Smith adapt to his environment? Because he does have to do a little. A little adapting.
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David Smith
Yeah. I mean, his. I think Smith is kind of an interesting character in that he really is a sort of comedian. I think he is a character who's, like, constantly shifting with his environment, constantly determining what to show versus what to withhold and kind of becoming the version of himself that is most palatable in these different spaces, Whether it's recovery rooms, whether it's downtown parties, whether it's his parents kind of, you know, Southern black world. And so he's constantly making these kind of micro adjustments to how he presents. But I think that performance is also really exhausting to him. I think he feels very confined by it.
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Alison Stewart
Why would he be exhausted by it?
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David Smith
I think, you know, it is in some ways second nature to him to perform himself in this way and to walk into a room be like, this is how people are perceiving me. Here's how. I'm either gonna push against that or, like, you know, ramp up that perception to my own benefit. That comes as second nature to Smith. And it's not really until after the arrest and after he's, like, entering recovery. And there are real stakes behind this where it's like, okay, if you play this game wrong, you could end up in a prison cell. That it starts to become. It starts to really wear on him, kind of wear on his body. And he becomes. Yeah. Just more acutely aware of the sort of constant performance.
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Alison Stewart
How did his arrest shift his perspective on his use of. Of drugs, which was something that happened at parties for kids his age.
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David Smith
Yeah, I mean, something that I was. I was interested in looking at was, you know, how differently, I think kind of recreational drug use is talked about in the sort of. Yeah. Black professional milieu of his parents versus, like, the. The sort of downtown New York party scene where it. Where it is so normalized. And I think Smith had certain illusions about the world that he. Because of his, you know, elite degree and his class background that he was insulated from, again, a lot of the kind of realities that befall black folks, black men who. Who use drugs recreationally. And we see after his arrest that kind of illusion falling away. But we also see ultimately that he. He is protected to a degree. And I was kind of interested in, like, that push, pull of the gradations of privilege that his particular kind of race, class, intersection give him.
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Alison Stewart
He has a very normal name. Dave Smith.
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Rob Franklin
Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
What went into Dave Smith?
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David Smith
Yeah, I mean it factors into the plot a little bit just because at one point Smith is concerned that they're.
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Alison Stewart
Gonna find out who he is.
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David Smith
He's concerned that it's gonna be, you know, printed in a newspaper. But he's protected by the anonymity of his name. You know there are David Smith's constantly getting arrested for all sorts of things. But I was really interested in Smith being a kind of everyman and like having this name that's, that's sort of common, anonymous in some ways. But also then he takes his last name, Smith, obviously an incredibly common one and he makes it a first name which makes it kind of distinct. I don't personally know a lot of first name Smiths. It makes it sort of distinct and singular and almost kind of like fashionable. And so in that way he's sort of setting himself apart from his family unit.
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Alison Stewart
The name of the book is Great Black Hope. It is written by Rob Franklin. It is out today. Congratulations on getting your book out and into the world.
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Rob Franklin
Thank you so much.
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