‘The Level of Unhorniness Is Shocking’

This discussion originally appeared in Beach Read Book Club, a limited-run newsletter where New York staff discuss the season’s buzziest books alongside our readers. To be the first to join the conversation, sign up here.

This year’s Beach Read Book Club is presented by Madewell.
Made for Summer. Meant for the Beach.

Time to wrap it up! This is Beach Read Book Club’s final discussion of the summer. Our readers are talking about chapters 19 through 28 of Great Black Hope, Smith’s return to the city, and where they predict he might go from here. (And if you’re still catching up, here are sections one, two, and three.)

Should we start with O? What role do you think they are meant to play in the book? 

Tembe Denton-Hurst: All Smith needed was the expansiveness of gender to really unlock whatever was deep within him. There is a little bit of a magical-Negro element with O.

Allison P. Davis: “Manic pixie dream Negro” is what I kept saying in my head.

Jason P. Frank: It’s giving fairy godmother.

T.D.H.: He found O randomly and they were like, “Come with me, my child. I’ll make all your dreams come true.”

A.P.D.: I got stuck on that image of Smith arriving with the bottle of wine and O being like, “No, that’s not what we do here.”

Alison Willmore: “We go to the streets and do harm-reduction services.”

Brandon Sanchez: Not to be, like, Guy Who’s Only Read The Corrections, but the introduction of O reminded me of a section in that book where the matriarch of the Lambert family meets a woman who unloads all of her family drama, and the interaction ends up being a fun-house mirror and the contrast tells you a lot. That’s what I thought it was going to be with O. I like the contrast with O because they let Smith reflect a little bit. Smith calls himself a “child of Barack, weaned on the myth of linear progress” and contrasts that with O’s upbringing under a different kind of progressivism. I was interested in the dynamic that was being set up.

A.W.: There’s still never any moment where you understand why these characters want to hang out with Smith. Smith just slides into this radical friend group without issue, aside from Tia. The general lack of friction reminds me a bit of Elle’s friend group in the beginning — who disappear right after. You never understand why everyone takes Smith in because Smith is also a bit of an absence. Especially in this case, where these characters have values they are trying to act on. I have no idea what Smith’s politics are.

T.D.H.: We understand the value of Smith in the white groups. But the cool Black groups are notoriously hard to get into — and I’ll tell you from experience. They’re not inviting me to their cookout.

J.P.F.: That’s why I think O needs to maybe be horny. They sleep in bed together and O is like, “How nice! We didn’t touch!” Make the twink horny!

T.D.H.: I am still confused about why they bring him in because the time for wanting to help the Black kid who is still hanging out with white people in a way that feels concerning — there’s a cutoff for that. Nobody has time for that.

J.P.F.: O was raised in New York with lesbian moms … I think this person has a friend group.

Are we meant to believe they get together at the end?

J.P.F.: That’s why Smith is the host of the party at the end; they’re coupled off in some way. But you don’t get to be first lady of a party where you aren’t fucking. That’s not how it works.

A.W.: Smith keeps saying he doesn’t know if he’s attracted to O or to the idea of O.

T.D.H.: How much time has passed when they go from lying in bed looking at each other longingly to Smith being given tasks to chop things? Also, he’s met this new person, but he’s still not close to them. He doesn’t talk to them about the arrest or Carolyn or Elle. It’s empty even if it looks different and it’s exciting to him.

I would have liked O’s presence to be a more complicating factor earlier on in the book because they offer so much contrast. What does this look like in six months? Even if O likes Smith, how long does this last when it’s clear that O’s friend group has a very articulated sense of values and Smith seems to not? That’s a really compelling space for conflict to arise.

A.W.: Instead, it feels like this is just the latest scene Smith has dropped into and may drift out of later. In one sense, here is a possible future: a more legitimate or value-driven life. Yet Smith hasn’t told O anything about these enormous incidents shaping his life. He still just has one foot in this.

T.D.H.: Everybody seems to be babying Smith in this section, even though he’s supposed to be the one being helpful. At one point, he’s thinking about the trial and O is like, “Are you okay?” It says, “Smith nodded, and they took over for him in dicing the grape tomatoes. The blade slid without effort through the taut, ripe bodies. And as Smith admired the brutal and elegant act” — I’ve never known cutting a tomato to be brutal, but that’s fine — “rounding the counter for a better view, O saw he’d been left without a task and nodded to their phone on the counter.” Why would the person whose birthday it is be consistently babysitting you in this way? Are you helpful or are you helpless?

Also, typing in Tia’s name after seeing the photo on the phone! In what world would that not create conflict? This is grounds for fighting in any other context. If I curated a room where you don’t even know anybody — you are literally relegated to the galley kitchen, you’re chopping tomatoes — and you say, “Even though you had a very specific idea for your birthday, know what I’m going to do? Edit the guest list.”

J.P.F.: They’re not even hooking up. And it works out!

A.P.D.: Jason, would you say that’s the biggest offense to you in this novel?

J.P.F.: The level of unhorniness this gay guy has is so shocking to me. He doesn’t have sexual urges. Is he even attracted to these white men? There’s no sense of horniness in his attraction in that A-to-N section. Yet the asexuality is also not explored. And to put him in orbit of another queer person where they are in bed together and then neither of them has any kind of complicating horniness makes me think Rob Franklin didn’t want to write about it. There’s a lot of queer people here, and none of them wants to have sex. That’s not my experience of the queer community.

Emma Alpern: There is something weird about the scenes with O, Tia, and Mona. From the beginning, we have this highly critical protagonist who is judging everybody, seeing through everybody’s bullshit, and then all of a sudden we’re plopped into this world where there’s none of that. All these people are just good. They’re not horny. They’re not doing drugs, other than their special church-club thing, which was also so on the nose, this utopian ideal of partying that Smith didn’t know about. This scene is a solution the book is offering up that I don’t know fits in with the tenor of this novel.

Smith drinks a few times in this section, seemingly with no consequences. I’m wondering to what extent you read this book as a morality tale. And let’s talk about Carolyn’s journey.

A.W.: The most interesting thing is Smith’s kind of unhinged observation where he envies Carolyn and how she’s a rich girl who is going to be cushioned in her addictions and there’s something romantic about that. He says,

For to be seen to have a problem struck him as a luxury, one that would give her the space and time to negotiate on her terms, to learn over decades its contours. It was a harrowing burden, and yet, yes, a luxury afforded to few. And with his envy came a wave of overwhelming resentment for which he saw no easy resolve. 

I’m like, What are you envious of?

T.D.H.: Whiteness, no accountability. This is the contemporary-novel problem: using identity as a trapdoor to escape accountability and this notion that intersectionality only exists as a sliding scale of how much people are able to behave badly and get away with it. In shows like White Lotus and Succession, people can be wealthy and horrible while the people right beneath them desire the same thing their identity markers lock them out of. It’s the most frustrating and sycophantic line of art-making. This just feels like hegemonic production. The rich get to continue getting away with it, and the people beneath them get to be sad that they are not that. It’s a deification of the white maleness everyone claims to abhor but then secretly wants access to. If we’re boiling it down to the Hobbesian idea of life and the rich get richer, what is the point? That everybody should be able to treat people badly and be liked afterward?

A.P.D.: When Smith was talking to his mother about his drug addiction in the last section, I didn’t understand what was going on there until now. He wishes he had the coddling Carolyn addiction. Was he looking for his mom to treat him like a white socialite daughter instead of leading with respectability politics? I thought that exchange was so strange because I was like, I didn’t really know you had a problem. I thought you got caught doing blow.

T.D.H.: But he also imagines this false warmth. We never hear about Carolyn’s parents. All of these things she undertakes are totally solo projects. So what does Smith want? More removed parents who don’t fly up when they hear you’re in trouble? Smith is in a situation where he has a safety net — his family. Are you saying you want to continue to spiral out in a bunch of rooms of people who don’t care about you? That you don’t value community, even if the community is imperfect?

J.P.F.: Should we talk about the scene with Elle’s mom?

E.A.: The photo negatives are another thread that gets totally dropped. When Smith discovered them and was like, “I’m going to find the guy who did this,” I was like, Okay, here comes the rest of the mystery engine of this book. I don’t want to say this book should be something it’s not, but it is weird to me to put that in and set it up and then just let it wilt.

T.D.H.: When books get edited, there’s an impulse to add a certain level of narrative propulsion. There’s marketing around this book being a thriller even though it reads more to me like a grief novel. There’s a very real and heartbreaking thing here: A white girl gets to party and ends up being fine, and Elle leaves a club one night after doing functionally the same thing and ends up dead under a bridge. I don’t think it’s that neat of a dichotomy — I don’t even think we needed a Carolyn character. I think it’s about how life is unfair and the way people treat this story and character is racialized. We can meditate on that really deeply without having photo negatives, especially if we’re not following it through to an end. It can just be sad.

You see the mother of your best friend who has passed away — if anything, that was the moment for a dam to break. This is a person you can kind of commiserate with, but she lost a daughter and you lost a friend. I could see that being a really complicated emotional moment. Instead, it was ruminating on whether she was on tour to pay her debts and basking in her celebrity.

J.P.F.: I liked having a scene where Smith has to contend with someone else’s grief. But I wanted them to hash out some uglier emotions. Conversations in this book are very short on dialogue and then every short sentence gets narrated on. This conversation takes up a few pages but not because it says a lot. It would have been helpful to let the dialogue really speak for itself. I wanted to hear how she spoke. This is someone contending with the same thing as Smith but in a different way. The situation was well set up, but I wanted a conversation rather than a bullet-point analysis.

T.D.H.: Smith does all this legwork and goes through another montage of running through the streets of New York, arms pumping, to find Carolyn, only to be upset when she’s alive. Why chase after your friend if you’re going to be like, “I’ll never speak to you again.” As if this is aberrant behavior. Who are you angry at? Are you angry at the system that allowed her to be alive? I didn’t understand what I was looking at in that scene.

A.W.: She basically tells him that he likes her because she’s a chaos monster who makes trouble. I agree that there doesn’t need to be a Carolyn. I don’t want to wish this book into something else, but it doesn’t knit together Smith’s story with the grief and Elle. Despite there being a real incident that inspired the book, Elle and her situation almost exist within a bubble within the rest of the story. I would love to delve more into that. Some of the stuff Carolyn does is maybe related to Elle, that idea of wanting to glom on to someone who is this larger-than-life nightlife star. I feel like that character gets split into these two different women, one of whom is an absence.

T.D.H.: It would have been interesting if Smith had said to her, “I’m angry that you’re here and she’s not.” Smith is angry. There’s this low-simmering rage, but it never goes anywhere and feels nonspecific. Someone like James Baldwin was very specific about what was making him angry. Is this anger inherited? Does Blackness not allow us to behave badly? Or is it a trap, and wealth helps us get closer to freedom but not all the way there? I’m okay with nonspecific anger, but I need it to manifest.

B.S.: I read the Carolyn wild-goose chase cynically because it comes on the heels of this court date where nothing happens. He gets off free, as we expected. And now, since this is a thriller, we need to go chase down Carolyn. It’s a plot device that gives us at least a little bit of a twist before the ending with O at the dinner party.

It’s also an excuse to write about China Chalet. 

B.S.: I really loved the China Chalet set piece, the descriptions, and the fight with the blunt bottle.

A.W.: Yeah, “You took my Gucci loafers.” That’s some classic circles-of-hell New York nightlife literature. That was fun.

E.A.: Do we know who Franklin reads? I’m curious about whom he’s trying to write like because in a strange way Ben Lerner popped into my head. Maybe that explains some of the plotlessness.

J.P.F.: The most fun parts of the circles of nightlife hell remind me a little bit of Rent Boy, by Gary Indiana, where nightlife is a limbo hell that you’re conscripted to. Everybody knows one another, and it’s all a mess, and you are commenting on it and participating in it — and other people are commenting on you.

T.D.H.: I took Franklin on a book date. The books he mentioned were Just Kids, by Patti Smith; Open City, by Teju Cole; Negroland, by Margo Jefferson; and White Girls, by Hilton Als. He likes Rachel Cusk.

A.P.D.: I don’t need an engine — I love a vibe. But by the end of it, I felt like, I’m tired of being in your head — kind of. I’m not even really fully in your head. 

A.W.: Can I ask a random question? Is Smith hot?

J.P.F.: Smith thinks he’s hot.

T.D.H.: I think Smith is hot to a very specific group of people. At Everyday People, he is a four. At the Surf Club in Montauk, he’s a stone-cold nine. With Mona’s crew, I think he’s a solid six. But we didn’t get any sense of what they looked like. “Young, gifted, and Black” is not a description.

A.P.D.: What was that one section about the spiritual children of Solange or something? I knew what that looked like.

T.D.H.: You could get more specific: “They caught every Black show at the Guggenheim.” There are a lot of Solange’s children running around Bed-Stuy who spend their days sitting outside of Sincerely, Tommy.

As journalists, how did you feel about the Vanity Fair story about Elle?

E.A.: I definitely laughed at the idea of a reporter sending out her entire story to people who weren’t even in it. And then there’s no reason I could think of for it to be sent out ahead of time in the book. It could have just come out and he could have read it.

T.D.H.: He never warned anybody. That would have been a good excuse for Smith to talk to Dre. Grief sometimes separates people, but I found it interesting that the article comes out and everyone’s just texting him. He didn’t talk to anybody else.

A.W.: Like everything else, it seems as if it should lead to conflict, but then it doesn’t. You’re like, Oh, there’s going to be something in this that implicates him in some way that he feels is unfair, and he’s going to talk to this person, or something like that. I kept waiting for him to reply ill-advisedly to this journalist.

T.D.H.: There’s something realistic about big things happening that don’t fundamentally change our day-to-day. But I do think that’s hard if we don’t have a lot of connection to Smith’s interiority. Not only does he not respond to the email, we don’t necessarily get a sense of how it affects him. But it was interesting, this idea that everyone’s ground up into fodder to be taxonomized — the thing he does to everybody.