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 Elle'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, "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 7:00 PM at the PUBLIC Hotel with McNally Jackson Books. Then Rob will be in conversation with author Roxane Gay, Wednesday, June 25th at Harlem School of the Arts on St. Nicholas Avenue, but he's across from me right now in studio. Happy publication day.

Rob Franklin: Thank you so much, Alison. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: You started writing this novel the day before your 26th birthday?

Rob Franklin: Yes, that's correct.

Alison Stewart: What were you grappling with? What were you thinking about as you sat down to write this novel?

Rob Franklin: Yes, so as you said, I started this when I was 25, about to turn 26. 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. Just like back in my childhood bedroom, 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.

Without any real agenda in mind, I sat down and wrote 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 the Southern Black bourgeoisie world of his parents, and then the downtown New York club scene. 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.

Alison Stewart: In those 10 pages that you wrote, what emerged? What emerged about this protagonist Smith that you didn't really know when you sat down to write it, but it's like, "Oh, wow. Oh, wow, this is coming out"?

Rob Franklin: Yes, I think I was really interested in-- we think of a preoccupation with achievement or respectability, external image, in some ways, as a positive thing. These are things that Smith was schooled in from a young age, but I was really interested in the way that that can become almost a kind of cancer in people's lives. Particularly, I think, for the Black upper-middle-class milieu that Smith is a part of, that's up against and actively working against a lot of projections being placed upon them.

Alison Stewart: What's the old saying? You have the three generations. You sow it, you grow it, and the third generation blows it?

Rob Franklin: Okay. We definitely have that dynamic. I'm not familiar with that phrase, but we have that at play in Great Black Hope because we see three generations of Smith's family. We see his grandmother, who, we learn in a flashback, grew up on sharecropping farm and becomes one of the first Black women lawyers in Texas. Then we see his parents' generation, who are the products of that first generation's hard work and labor, go on to Ivy League colleges and become professionals and do the safe but very upwardly mobile path of becoming doctors and lawyers, and then we see Smith's generation. Something I really wanted to capture was how decades and generations of that uphill climb, that labor can be undone in a single night.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Rob Franklin. The name of his book is Great Black Hope. It is out today. I'm going to ask you to read the introduction for us. Can you set this up for us?

Rob Franklin: Absolutely. It doesn't need a ton of intro because we're right at the beginning.

Alison Stewart: Okay, go for it.

Rob Franklin: Yes, okay. "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 Medellín, 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 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 the 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 and 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, in freshman seminars and frat parties, and before that, on teen tours or tennis camps where they've 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. 6 feet and 3 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 bass of a bop that had reigned the charts all summer."

"Here is where the night splits open along its tight-stitched seam. The realization, arriving at a tan vehicle marked 'Southampton Police,' that these men, khaki polos, were not the club security he'd assumed at first they were. The night bled surreally. 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 phosphenes blinker in the darkness, a chorus of cameras flashing. He'd worn, in his mugshot, a vintage Marni gingham shirt, loose-fit linen trousers, and a gently startled expression."

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?

Rob Franklin: Yes. Before, I was saying all of that generational mobility can be undone in a single night. Yes, that line, in essence, it's undone in 20 minutes. We see, I think, in that passage that for the cops, this is just another night. This is procedural. Often, they're trying to make quotas before the end of the month or the end of the summer. Yes, for Smith and for his family, it's catastrophic.

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 write in a very beautiful poetic style, I'm curious what the editing process was like for you.

Rob Franklin: Yes, so actually, this opening, I think, it definitely went through a ton of editing and a bunch of rewrites. It is one of the pieces of the book that has survived pretty much from the first draft, this almost prose poem opening, which is, I think, in a different voice than much of the rest of the novel. I liked the idea of setting it apart formally from the narrative voice of a lot of the rest of the novel.

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.

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Alison Stewart: 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. Smith, he gets in trouble, and this is what I thought was really interesting. He decides to, his parents decide to interview several lawyers. How does he decide which lawyer to go with?

Rob Franklin: Yes, so in an early chapter, we see the Smith family. Smith is his last name, but he also goes by his first name, David Smith. We see the Smith family interviewing a couple of different lawyers. One is, in some ways, very aligned with them culturally. One of the lawyers is a Howard graduate and a graduate of Harvard Law and is a member of the Black bourgeoisie, who understands the emotional weight that this arrest has for the family and promises to really fight for Smith. Then the other one is a local lawyer, is a lawyer in the Hamptons who says he knows all of the people involved and has a really different pitch. It's less of a hard pitch but, ultimately, one that they see the value in because they know the value of network and how things work in these small, elite towns.

Alison Stewart: What facet of the criminal justice system did you want to explore through Smith?

Rob Franklin: I was really interested in the history of and changing frontier of the war on drugs, and how Smith's class privilege ultimately 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. In the book, we get through Smith's grandmother to look at some 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 Len Bias in all of the almost cultural detritus around narratives of Black bodies and addiction that have fed into a policy framework within the war on drugs. Then we also look at the changing current landscape amid the opiate crisis. All through character and scene, that was important to me.

Alison Stewart: Of course. Well, why was that more important to you?

Rob Franklin: I think I knew when I was writing this that it was, in some ways, a political novel. I was excited about that as a prospect. Through a lot of back-and-forth with my agents, with my editors, with peers in my MFA program, with my thesis advisor, I cut back a lot of the more didactic, essayistic-type things where it was me, the author, wants to say this.

Alison Stewart: Wants you to know this.

[laughter]

Rob Franklin: It's like, "Okay, just write an essay collection." Pared back a lot of that and was able to embed some of those ideas into Smith walking around his landscape, walking around New York, and observing things, and navigating that through character and through in-scene narrative rather than just through interior essayistic prose.

Alison Stewart: How does Smith adapt to his environment? Because he does have to do a little adapting.

Rob Franklin: Yes. I think Smith is an interesting character in that he really is a chameleon. I think he is a character who's constantly shifting with his environment, constantly determining what to show versus what to withhold, and 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' Southern Black world. He's constantly making these 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.

Alison Stewart: Why would he be exhausted by it?

Rob Franklin: I think 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 going to push against that or ramp up that perception to my own benefit." That comes as second nature to Smith. It's not really until after the arrest and after he's entering recovery. 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 really wear on him, wear on his body. He becomes just more acutely aware of the constant performance.

Alison Stewart: How did his arrest shift his perspective on his use of drugs, which was something that happened at parties for kids his age?

Rob Franklin: Yes, something that I was interested in looking at was how differently, I think, recreational drug use is talked about in the Black professional milieu of his parents versus the downtown New York party scene, where it is so normalized. I think Smith had certain illusions about the world because of his elite degree and his class background that he was insulated from, again, a lot of the realities that befall Black folks, Black men who use drugs recreationally. We see, after his arrest, that illusion falling away. We also see, ultimately, that he is protected to a degree. I was interested in that push-pull of the gradations of privilege that his particular race-class intersection give him.

Alison Stewart: He has a very normal name. Dave Smith.

Rob Franklin: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What went into Dave Smith?

Rob Franklin: It factors into the plot a little bit just because, at one point, Smith is concerned that--

Alison Stewart: They're going to find out who he is. [laughs]

Rob Franklin: Yes, he's concerned that it's going to be printed in a newspaper, but he's protected by the anonymity of his name. There are David Smiths constantly getting arrested for all sorts of things. I was really interested in Smith being a kind of everyman and having this name that's common, anonymous in some ways. Also then he takes his last name, Smith, obviously, an incredibly common one, and he makes it a first name, which makes it distinct. I don't personally know a lot of first-name Smiths. It makes it distinct and singular and almost fashionable. In that way, he's setting himself apart from his family unit.

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.

Rob Franklin: Thank you so much.