Rob Franklin describes his debut novel as his “full-minded obsession” for the past four-and-a-half years. He began the book in 2020, while studying at New York University for a Master of Fine Arts degree, after setting aside the draft of an earlier novel set in Berlin. Great Black Hope (Summit, June 3), an electric tale of race, class, and misspent youth, was the first acquisition of the newly relaunched Summit Books imprint of Simon & Schuster and will be published, with its own high hopes, in June.  

As Great Black Hope opens, 20-something Smith is arrested at a Hamptons nightspot for possession of 0.7 grams of cocaine. Smith is a child of the Black middle class, torn between his family’s aspirations for him and his New York party lifestyle; he’s already reeling from the overdose death of his best friend, Elle England, just weeks earlier. While awaiting trial over the next few months, Smith will endure court-mandated treatment sessions on Zoom, drift through the holidays at his childhood home in Atlanta, and reflect on the life events that brought him to this fraught juncture. Kirkus’ starred review calls it a “captivating novel of dissolution and redemption,” and it comes emblazoned with rapturous blurbs from Kaveh Akbar, Katie Kitamura, and others.

Franklin, 31, grew up in Atlanta, attended Stanford University, and now teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He recently joined us on a video call from his apartment in Brooklyn to talk about this highly anticipated debut; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Congratulations on the upcoming publication of Great Black Hope—it’s such a good novel. How did you start writing fiction?

I came to writing fiction through poetry. In high school one of my best friends gave me a collection called Crush by Richard Siken, a book I still really love. In distinction from the canonical poetry we were reading in class, that book was doing something formally and voice-wise that was very exciting to me. After that, I started writing poetry that was very heavily informed by Siken—copycat poetry—and publishing in our high school literary magazine. Then in college, I started taking more creative writing classes and ended up minoring in poetry. I took one or two fiction workshops and wrote a couple short stories. It really wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I took a stab at writing a novel, and I kind of fell backward into it.

Are there other books or writers that were touchstones for you and this novel?

I would say Citizen by Claudia Rankine was massively influential for me. Bluets by Maggie Nelson. Two nonfiction books, Negroland by Margo Jefferson and White Girls by Hilton Als, for their analysis of identity and power. I was also looking to these New York texts, like Just Kids by Patti Smith, and novels by Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney.

What would you say was one of your biggest challenges in writing Great Black Hope? And something that was a pleasure or a great discovery?

I had initially envisioned that the middle section of the book—the Atlanta section—would be very digressive, kind of essayistic, weaving between narrative prose and essay. Figuring out how to still have that as an element of the book without detracting from the narrative propulsion was really difficult. It was a frustration but also an exciting exercise to figure out how much bell hooks or Frantz Fanon I could bring in without completely halting the momentum of the novel.

What was really a pleasure to write—and came more naturally—was the slightly satirical view of the downtown [New York] club scene. Those passages were just really fun. I love a good party scene.

Let’s talk about the protagonist. His name is David Smith, but he goes by Smith. I was wondering about that decision.

I wanted him to have a common name, a family name that he shares with his father. It figures into the plot because Smith has this [fear] that people are going to hear about his arrest, but he’s insulated by the anonymity of his name. But I also thought it was in keeping with the character, someone who forged his own path apart from his parents, to take his last name as a first name, which makes it distinct and sort of chic, almost like somebody deciding to go by an alias.

And you get to use that great phrase “the David Smiths,” referring to Smith and his dad collectively.

Yes!

Smith is complicated. He’s had a comfortable childhood in many ways, but he’s also not far removed from the hardships that his family experienced historically. One passage has a flashback to his grandmother’s youth in Brazos, Texas, and some of the horrific things that happened to Black people there. How do you want readers to feel about Smith?

Obviously, I want there to be warmth towards him, and a sense of rooting for him as a character. But I didn’t want to make him morally perfect. There can be a tendency, maybe especially for Black writers, or writers from marginalized backgrounds, to create characters that have the moral upper hand. There are a couple of times, say, in Smith’s dynamic with [his white friend] Carolyn, where he feels like he has the moral upper hand and realizes that he can actually be quite cruel when he’s acting on that as an impulse. I did want [readers] to feel like there was some darkness there.

He’s messy, right? How did you decide to open the novel with his arrest for drug possession?

At some point I questioned if Elle’s death could be the start of the novel and then quickly decided that it felt more propulsive to have the novel be structured around Smith’s court case, starting with the arrest and through to the eventual verdict, with flashbacks that allow us to see the closeness of his friendship with Elle as well as his disorientation in the immediate aftermath of her death. Also, that opening is another party scene. It’s not a fun one, but there’s a sense of movement and energy and a tone that I’m drawn to.

Can you say something about the title and how it came to be?

I found this old Vanity Fair profile of Colin Powell [titled “The Great Black Hope”] from when he was leaving the military and going into politics in the ’90s. People didn’t know which party he was aligned with and would hold up his background as a cipher to figure out where his loyalties lay. That profile is a piece of writing that I really love. It depicts him as playing the game of the “respectable Negro” very well, very strategically. It seemed interesting to me that this phrase, which has also been applied to people like Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama, could then be used to describe this upwardly mobile, downwardly spiraling Black 20-something. I put that title on the Google Doc thinking of it mostly as tongue-in-cheek, and it’s only been through the writing, and rewriting, and editing, and hearing how other people read the book that I see where it is also kind of earnest, because we do end on a more hopeful note. It may not be a straightforwardly redemptive arc, but there’s a sense that Smith does recapture hope after these experiences. I like the duality of that title.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.