GLR May-June 2026

An Outsider among Outsiders

R OB FRANKLIN’S richly ob served debut novel Great Black Hope begins with its protago nist Smith under arrest in the Hamptons for cocaine possession. A gay Stanford graduate whose parents are mem bers of Atlanta’s Black “Talented Tenth,” Smith travels in the world of “upwardly mobile urbanites who’d come to New

cepted by his artistic and open-minded crowd, he remains an outsider: “Though he had nothing to offer in the way of weekend houses, Smith understood his cachet among their kind. … Being wealthy and white had, of late, become unfashionable, at least without the veneer of multicultur alism. One could not seem worldly if one’s world constituted only the boarding school

R EGINALD H ARRIS

GREAT BLACK HOPE: A Novel by Rob Franklin Simon & Schuster/Summit Books. 320 pages, $19.

set, so they looked to Smith—as to the other brown, queer in terlopers who passed through their parties—as a guide to an exotic landscape.” As he observes of his fellow “prep-school negros”: “They’d faced, each in their way, a lifetime of disso nance, of alternately stunted and impossible expectations to which they could respond in one of two ways: adopt the twice as-good ethos of their parents’ generation or rebel and in that rebellion sacrifice themselves.” A series of failed relationships with white men (labeled from “A” to “N”) also reveals to Smith that he is “not so much interested sexually in gratification as in being desired.” For all the seriousness of its themes

York to devour it.” His life, however, feels empty. Uninspired by his job as a content strategist at the “disruptive” art world start-up CNVS, Smith floats through a nightly circuit of hot clubs and trendy restaurants fueled by alcohol and drugs. His best friend and roommate Elle England, a photographer and the daughter of a semi-reclusive 1990s soul singer, was his link to the world, “always bringing him out, out of his room, and his mind, into the world—and into people.” Elle disap pears and is found dead in a Bronx park from an apparent drug overdose a month before Smith’s arrest. His life is spinning out of control.

Smith’s father, retired HBCU presi dent David Smith Sr., finds him a Hamp tons-area lawyer who characterizes him in court as “a stereotypical Young Urban Male in Trouble, First-Time Offender Edition.” Mandated to undergo regular drug testing and treatment before what they hope will be a minimum sentence, Smith considers his online therapy ses sions useless, with the psychiatrist Mancini more interested in his own mus ings and conclusions than listening to patients. Another of Smith’s trendy friends, Carolyn Astley, moves “through life as one hopes to move through any party, a frothy champagne whisper, never in any one place long enough to grow dull” and

and the protagonist’s situation, Great Black Hope is also a work of hilarious, shade-filled social satire. Author Rob Franklin, who teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and is an editor of the online fiction journal Joyland , presents Smith’s life in a wry, distant style. There is a hint of TheGreat Gatsby ’s Nick Carraway in Smith as he looks at his high-flying peers with a jaded side-eye. He describes a VIP room during the celebrity chef’s restaurant opening thus: “It’s giving Dark Room, by Halston.” Of a suddenly trendy Chi nese-restaurant-by-day/club-by-night in the Financial District, he writes: “the gays and downtown set caught wind and,

Rob Franklin. Jacket photo for Great Black Hope .

rebranding its tackiness as camp, descended upon the venue with the gusto of the Allies at Normandy.” Even the redesigned pride flag is not safe from critique, as Smith wonders “whether collective liberation came always at the expense of good taste.” In keeping with Smith’s aspiration to be a poet-protagonist, Great Black Hope often sparkles with passages of radiant prose. The end of a quiet afternoon transforms into this: “The day grew fat in its middle, then burned off in crimson wisps—the surprise of sunset arriving through a far window and engulfing every or dinary thing in gold.” Franklin refers to “a story so innately of New York, in which the uneasy proximity of excess to incon ceivable tragedy was a daily animating tension.” Likewise his novel is an engrossing story, enhanced by its often biting ob servations on celebrity, race, and class among contemporary Manhattan’s elite.

begins an enthusiastic but predictably disastrous affair with a married celebrity chef. Before his sentencing, Smith takes a brief Christmas trip back to his childhood home in Atlanta. Quickly chafing under the weight of expectations from family members who still want him to “learn the family trade of earn ing a passive income,” Smith returns to New York to discover that yet another reporter plans to turn his late friend into tabloid fodder with a new exposé, “The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of Elle England.” “In death, she was famous, and the work of fame is to be consumed.” After a lifetime of “reading the room, intuiting what it was people wanted from him, what they needed him to be,” and unsure of how well he really knows his friends, Smith has no clear sense of himself or what he wants. While Smith’s race and sexual orientation appear to be ac

Reginald Harris is a poet and writer based in Brooklyn. May–June 2026

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