Rob Franklin stopped by the Daily Show to discuss his debut novel, Great Black Hope.
Franklin’s novel, published last month by Summit, follows David Smith, a queer Black man who’s arrested for cocaine possession weeks after his best friend dies, apparently from a drug overdose. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book, which is longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, “a captivating novel of dissolution and redemption.”
Daily Show correspondent Josh Johnson asked Franklin about his protagonist’s identity as a queer, Black, wealthy man.
“I was really interested in this question of how, in the court system, Smith’s class protects him or insulates him, but his race does not,” Franklin said. “So this kind of tension between his race and class identities is really at the heart of the novel. I definitely think that that’s something I’ve observed in my own life and wanted to bring into the book. When you begin the novel…we see a Black man who’s arrested in the Hamptons, and people may have certain expectations about where this story is going to go, based on all of the cultural detritus and history and images of Black men ensnared in the criminal justice system.”
Johnson asked Franklin about the narrative that class, and not race, is the more important factor in today’s society.
“I think it so depends on the context,” Franklin said. “In the book, when Smith is entering a room, his race privilege is what people are consuming about him first. That’s external. And a lot of expectations and projections are being placed on him in 12-step meetings or the for-profit group recovery that he’s court mandated into. Discovering the complexity of his identity requires actually talking to him. In the book, a lot of his queerness, a lot of his class background, and the Black respectability politics of his family are apparent to the reader, or explored in Smith’s interiority, but aren’t always evident to the people he’s encountering.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
