In Rob Franklin's ‘Great Black Hope,' a life nearly undone in one disastrous moment
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Smith, Elle, and his white friend Caroline all come from financially comfortable backgrounds, but the specifics couldn't be more different, Franklin says. 'I was really interested in writing a novel of manners that pays attention to social codes a lot. Someone like Smith grew up in an upper middle class Black household, a world that's really preoccupied with respectability, and Caroline was raised in a sort of East Coast, European Art world family.'
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It was important to him to avoid over-explaining these telling details. 'I feel like I can trust my readers,' Franklin says. 'Specifically with depicting Black culture for a wider audience, it feels important to me not to set my default audience to white. Treating Black pop and cultural references as equally valid and mainstream — that's really satisfying to the readers who are produced by those worlds, to see them represented on the page but not in this 'teachable moment' way.'
Rob Franklin will read at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 17, at
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And now for some recommendations ...
Joyce Carol Oates is famously hyper-prolific, so it's no surprise she's written a big summer book — yet somehow her new novel, '
'It's always a folly in farming to think you know what you're doing,' writes Helen Whybrow in her beautiful memoir, '
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Another profoundly lovely book about the natural world is Robert Finch's '
Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section.
Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at
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