Book Date No. 14

A trip to Greenlight with Rob Franklin.

This past Friday I met up with novelist Rob Franklin at Greenlight, whose debut novel Great Black Hope, is out today. It’s one of my most anticipated reads of the year and I’m excited to dig into the world he’s crafted, which stares down the intersection of race and class and wrings it dry. It’s exactly the kind of thing I’d like to see exist in the world. Read about our date at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, below.

Can you state your name for the record?

Rob Franklin.

And what do you do?

I'm a writer and the author of Great Black Hope.

Where are you from?

Originally from Atlanta, but I've lived in New York for 10 years now.

How has that shaped you?

Atlanta's a really distinct city in a thousand ways, but it's a kind of Black professional metropolis.

Upwardly mobile Black people love Atlanta.

Yes, yes. The southern Black bourgeoisie vibe of Atlanta not only affected my personality, but it certainly really affected this novel, part of which takes place in Atlanta. I grew up in a part of Atlanta that has a lot of Black pride. I grew up on a historically Black college campus, Morehouse's campus. Many of my cultural references or creative references were from Black art of the 20th century. It was Spike Lee, it was Toni Morrison. It was bell hooks. But there are some downsides to that world. There’s a real preoccupation with presenting a certain way, with respectability, with achievement in a legible way. It can feel like a lot of pressure.

When did you become a reader?

My mom always jokes that it was impossible to get me to read when I was a kid, and that some icon in the marketing department at Nickelodeon had figured out that they could rip off parents by just taking their TV show scripts and turning them into books. For Christmas I got the book scripts of Kenan and Kel. Those were the only books my mom could get me to read as a child. As a tween, like so many other millennials, I began to read the writing of a woman who shall not be named. And that did kind of turn me into a reader. By the time I was in high school, I started to develop taste as a reader. I got very into reading poetry. Richard Siken, Mark Doty, Gregory Moore. In terms of fiction, I was reading Miranda July, who I still love. I read her short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You in high school and loved it. Then more canonical, like James Baldwin. I read Giovanni's Room for the first time in high school and really loved it.

What books shaped you?

One that I often mention is Crush by Richard Siken, which was the first book that made me want to write. It was given to me by a friend who’s a poet and more of a poetry buff than I was. It completely shifted my view of what poetry could be. It was so dissimilar to what we were reading in English class. It had a sense of dynamism and verve. It had the urgency of being young and queer and in love and obsessed with someone. I was like, if I could do some version of this, I would be happy with my life. Going into college, I started reading more. I was very into hybrid texts. I guess what we call auto fiction. I really love Maggie Nelson Bluets. Citizen by Claudia Rankine, another favorite book of poetry that I read in college. Then I got very into Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, writers that were writing novels, but novels that felt like real life. and had the drifting, digressive quality of thinking. I really like the feeling of being in a smart person's brain when I'm reading. It’s more important to me than plot. Also really good line level writing. For this book in particular, I was trying to do something that referenced some of the New York texts that I love.

Say more about those.

From Just Kids by Patti Smith, her memoir, which I fucking love to Teju Cole’s Open City to the party novels of the eighties. So Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis. I think people can see the influence in mine. That was on one side of it—to write a kind of New York coming of age novel that looked at the glamor, but also heartache that can occur in one's twenties in New York. Then on the other side, a sociological look at race and class and gradations of privilege. I was thinking about books like Negroland by Margo Jefferson, White Girls by Hilton Als. These books that look at identity or look at relationships across identity lines and how they're pressure tested by the systems in which they're formed.

What question is Great Black Hope trying to answer? Or rather, what question are you posing?

At a time when I probably couldn't have given a concise answer as to what the book is about, my friend from my MFA program, Raha, read it and described it as a takedown of Black respectability politics. It is in some ways, but I think the question would be to what degree and in what ways is preoccupation with black respectability a hindrance for the people who hold it? How does it keep a person from knowing themselves? How does it metastasize into a cancer inside of you? The other one, and this is a question that has become clearer to me as more people have read it, is when everything in your life goes to shit, how do you find a way back to hope? That’s maybe a more earnest question that's undergirding the novel.

What books were you reading when you were writing?

When I was writing the first draft of Great Black Hope, I was in grad school, so I was reading a ton. I'm kind of a slow reader, so that was probably the only time in my life that I've been reading a book a week. We read Annie Ernaux Simple Passion and Happening. Her honesty and frankness was really appealing to me. There's a kind of glamor to it as well. Elizabeth Hardwick was another writer that I was introduced to in grad school that I loved.

In the middle section of the book, which takes place in Atlanta, Smith is reading a bunch of books from his father's library. He’s consuming a lot of Black scholarly texts from the 20th century and thinking about the kind of condition of Blackness. The books that he is reading in the book, I of course was reading as well, so it's like Franklin Frazier The Black Bourgeoisie, All About Love by bell hooks, Negroland by Margo Jefferson, Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham. I was really interested in the intra-Black community tensions that aren't really talked about. Class and color distinctions within the Black community. Great Black Hope, especially the middle section, looks at the harm of a notion like the Talented Tenth. I was reading more academic texts than I normally would in order to have those ideas. So finally actually reading Du Bois and Franz Fanon.

What are you reading right now?

I've been finding it really difficult to read in the weeks leading up to pub. Just been so overwhelmed. I have been reading a friend's forthcoming book, which is called Information Age by Cora Lewis. It's the first Joyland Editions, which is an indie press, and comes out in July. That has been easier for me to read in part because I know her and I want to finish it in a reasonable timeframe, but also it's written in this very lyrical, poetic prose. I can read a couple pages of it and feel like I was fed by it in some way. The language is so good.

How many books did you read last year?

Last year I was reading a lot because I was editing and writing. I don't count. I would guess between 20 and 25.

Do you have any standouts from that timeframe?

A nice thing about having a book come out is that people started sending galleys, so I read in November of last year, Audition by Katie Kitamura, which came out in April. It’s one of my favorite books from the past year. Absolutely loved it. I really liked All Fours by Miranda July. I know it was a controversial book. I liked it and thought it was bizarre in all the right ways.

I like her weird little brain. This was a more refined version of a thing that she's been doing for a long time. I really loved Brittany Newell's Soft Core, which also came out this year but I read last year. It reminded me of The Bell Jar but it was set in an S&M, San Francisco underworld. It’s a sexy environment. I loved my friend August Thompson’s book, Anyone’s Ghost, which someone called a dirtbag Call Me By Your Name. It’s a bisexual coming of age novel about two metalheads who have a fraught romantic relationship that ends in tragedy. One of my other favorites from last year was Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley, a beautiful memoir about grief and about losing her best friend who died by suicide. Despite the subject matter it’s a very comedic read. She's mostly a humorist and takes this really wry tone in talking about the disorienting experience of grief that I appreciated a lot.

How would you describe your literary taste?

I read for good language first and foremost. Good language is more important to me than plot, but plot is also great. I love a good story. I would say voice-driven and thoughtful. I like coming-of-age stories, especially if they’re set in the city. The same for TV shows. I'll watch a terrible TV show that's just about young people in New York. I tend to be more interested in queer writers, Black writers, in part because I'm trying to see what other people are doing. When I'm reading contemporary literature, I'm always stealing stuff and referencing stuff. I'm very interested to see what the pool looks like. There's a lot of books that I would never think from the description that I would like, but if the line level writing is strong and the voice is strong, then it can grab me.

What's an example of a book like that you read recently?

The Netenyahus by Joshua Cohen. It's not a book that I thought that I would be particularly interested in conceptually, but I thought that the execution was really strong. Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. I just think it's really well executed. He's doing the thing that he's trying to do exceedingly well, and it's okay to not like the thing that he's trying to do, but I think he's doing it successfully.