This first section sets up the book’s many initial conditions: Smith’s arrest, the arraignment, Elle’s death and Smith’s grief, his friendship with Carolyn, and an initial look into who Elle was. How well do you think Rob Franklin threads the needle among these things?
Allison P. Davis: At first I was like, Ooh, this is a lot of thriller. What’s gonna happen with the drug arrest? What happened to Elle? And then it settles into such a mellow place for something that has two big thrusters, which is really artful. I thought it lowered the stakes of the drug charge, but given that our character is a Black man in a very affluent white world with a charge that for a white trust-fund kid would have been written off, it has this really low, simmering tension that I’m enjoying.
Tembe Denton-Hurst: What I find really interesting is that the drug charge is — I don’t want to say it’s not that serious — but it’s not that serious. I’m curious what a different reader would assume would have happened in the worst-case scenario of that charge. Do people think that when Black people meet the police there’s suddenly three hots and a cot waiting for you? Because it doesn’t even go that far. Poor Black people interact with the police all of the time and get away with it, so to speak. So it’s interesting how that becomes a source of tension, but in a lot of ways it’s very run-of-the-mill. In Suffolk County, they deal with this shit all the time.
Allison D.: Do you think that’s Rob Franklin’s way of fucking with the reader a bit? Is that him making commentary on the way that our brains are conditioned to work?
Emma Alpern: There’s a version of this book where the stakes are higher, where his drug use is worse or scarier, where he’s on the verge of being thrown into prison, but that’s not what this book is doing, and I like that about it.
Brandon Sanchez: One of the things I was acclimating to in this section was the relationship between the prose style and the perspective. The prose is ornate and rich. But at the same time, there is this chilliness to the POV that feels kind of anesthetized in places. I often feel like Smith is either keeping me at arm’s length a bit or that his emotional life is inhibited in a way.
Jason P. Frank: I think Franklin wrote himself into a bit of a corner, where he has the worst parts of first person and the worst parts of third person. It’s in third person, but Smith knows everything about himself. We’re never, ever ahead of what Smith feels. Even when he has a negative emotion, Smith can immediately diagnose it and why he is doing this bad thing. At the opening of that restaurant, the narrator immediately diagnoses every piece of conversation. Which means that Smith is never wrong about it. He can always tell what everyone else is doing.
I think it would be helpful if this novel were either in first person so that we could, as readers, assume there’s some unreliable narration, or if it was in third person and the narrator had more remove and could point out where Smith was wrong. It feels like I’m simultaneously too close and kept at a distance.
Alison Willmore: I didn’t mind the distance because I don’t know that I trusted Smith’s judgments of other people. He is someone who is part of this scene but also removed from it, and that’s how he sees the place he’s been given.
In this section, there is the mystery-thriller aspect of what happened to Elle, but the other reveal is of how much rage Smith has. I think that is something he withholds and that is withheld by the book’s narration — in this world of ease that he has found his way into, how much privilege will be extended to him?
Tembe: This is the same issue I had with All Fours, by Miranda July — this idea that every choice is somehow supported and buoyed by the narration. There’s so much labor around creating a character whose bad decisions are somehow sympathetic or unproblematic because of the narrator’s decision to continuously construct a world in which this character is smarter, wittier, funnier, more thoughtful, sexier than everybody else simultaneously.
Smith has opted to be in this world. He never really talks about his choice to surround himself with people who do not look like him or are of a very different socioeconomic status. Within that, he valorizes where he is situated without acknowledging what exists beneath him. I think that saves him from being a character that some people might find problematic — we don’t understand his perspective on those outside of his privilege strata. And some of his observations felt a bit obvious.
Brandon: I think of that type of character as J.Lo characters, the types of roles she chooses for herself: sympathetic, to a point, but also looking flawless — the angel in the house who you are never not rooting for. Because of that, you miss out on a certain complication.
Allison D.: I think people go to too much therapy.
Tembe: Or they learn the wrong lessons. You’re over here psychoanalyzing; you need to look within, babe.
Allison D.: My therapist says that I diagnose my own problems before I feel any emotions. That’s true and it’s how I survive the world. But it sucks on the page, because everything is rendered so flat. There’s no real introspection. Those scenes where he’s describing the parties — and the party behind the party — are kind of evocative, but in the same way that loglines in TV scripts are. You can feel the world, but you’re not getting any insight or real emotional richness.
Alison W.: Do you guys feel like he is diagnosing people correctly? Because I thought that was actually a tension in that first scene. He feels like he sums up people really well, but at the same time, the character of Elle — someone he sees very clearly at certain points but also has whole aspects of her life that are a mystery — raised a question about how this slightly removed, slightly superior diagnosis of the scene could be a self-protective or self-delusional pose for him.
Emma: I had the same question. Why is he the only person who is able to diagnose? But we understand on some level that this is a very specific New York, where everybody’s doing that to everyone else in the room. And maybe that’s why Smith’s guard is so up. People are very aware of all the types in the city, some of which landed for me and some which didn’t. I loved the one about the guy called Kofi, “a poreless 30-something who’d spent the last decade in nightlife, seemingly against his will.” That was hilarious. Then, some feel kind of inexact and a bit dated, which is the risk when you’re writing this kind of social novel.
Tembe: One of the structural considerations I’m noticing is the ability to go from one room to another, how the environment changes as we go into deeper rooms, and how it becomes more intimate. It’s interesting because the room that Smith seems to be locked out of is the one where his identity and who he actually is is hiding. It does not feel like we’re ever going to open this damn door, and I think that’s a disservice to the heart of the novel. I would be less irritated by the flowery language if I felt there was something profound behind all of that. It almost feels like this is a person who goes home and just goes to bed.
Emma: I want to know who he is before his friend disappears. There’s a hint that he was more fun and more into the scene, but I don’t really understand how people interacted with him.
Allison D.: I want to see him without the performance. Even when he’s alone in his apartment, it’s always reflections on what other people have going on. Insulating your main character from criticism only invites us to criticize the main character more. There has been a Gatsby-ian energy in a lot of books that want to be social novels but are really about the mediocrity of the main character.
Alison W.: He is, especially in this first part, an absence. We don’t know what he wants, what he even likes or loves. He doesn’t seem to have strong attachments to anything except maybe that kind of magic possibility of the evening and what he says about being addicted to the night.
Brandon: I think you can infer what he is all about based on how he taxonomizes some of these “It” girls. He is drawn to Carolyn and, later, Elle, but that scene with Fernanda provided an interesting contrast — she’s apparently too busted and too shallow for him, even though on the surface she has some of the trappings Matthew Schneier listed in his essay on the “It” girl for the magazine a couple of years ago: frippery but she might be missing a kind of shamelessness. I think he is particularly drawn to Elle’s shameless quality — people who go after what they want to go after who are a little cheeky. He feels like some of that is not available to him as an outsider who needs to conform.
Alison W.: There’s that really interesting moment where he sees Carolyn with her restaurateur and the open want on her face, and finds it gross. She’s basically giving up her power in actually actively desiring something.
I wanted to ask about that moment, because when he sees her drinking with Rune, he feels contempt. Later on, their tension feels racial, but what about here?
Tembe: I picked up on that pretty early as racial. I interviewed Rob prior, so I knew where his interest lay in the writing of the book. I found this idea of identity interesting: not as the lens through which to view the world, but a trap door or a form of restriction. Because I don’t view identity in that way, I think it’s harder for me to read that on the page. It’s very clear to me that he kind of wants to body swap with a Carolyn, a thin white woman with access to a certain freedom. So to feel trapped even within your privileged space because of your Blackness, because of your maleness, is a very interesting path to walk down.
Was anything revealed about Smith’s character when we see him with his dad in the Hamptons? Or is this another moment where we’re actually not feeling the distance between him and his knowledge of other people. He says he’s never seen his dad look small.
Allison D.: I was like, Go ahead, girl. Give me nothing.
Tembe: This is the part of the book that I actually thought was interesting, when your parent is in an environment where they can’t fix something about the circumstances. This is when I felt his place — not as a Black man, but as a person. It was a coming-of-age moment for the character that felt relatable to me.
Allison D.: I felt a generic relatability and could equate that to my own life. But what did that mean to him? Was he like, “And now I feel more like a man” or “My God, now who’s going to protect me?” I just needed one insight.
Jason: When Elle really gets introduced at the end of this section, we finally arrive at someone who Smith doesn’t know everything about and that he can’t read. I felt myself completely open up to this book for the first time there. It made me think that maybe Elle was the sun he orbits, and without her he’s been completely shut off because she was the only person who he really felt connected to. Every time I was sitting with Elle, there was space between Smith and someone else who he wanted to bridge. I wanted to bridge it with him.
On a queer level, I was like, This is a diva to worship. There was something real about a queer man finding a really fabulous woman who he feels a desperate need to be around.
