In Rob Franklin's ‘Great Black Hope,' a life nearly undone in one disastrous moment

Boston Globe

2 days ago

Like Franklin, Smith grew up in a world of good schools, successful and involved parents, and regular attendance at church and Jack and Jill. But his life takes a turn after an unexpected drug bust in the Hamptons, the consequences of which loom over the novel, showing, as he says, 'the idea that all of that generational upward mobility could be undone in a single night.'
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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