Rob Franklin's Reading List

The novelist shares the seminal reads that helped shape 'Great Black Hope.'

In beginning to do press for my debut novel, Great Black Hope, I’ve noticed something of slight concern: so many of the books I see mine compared to — Bright Lights, Big City; and Bonfire of the Vanities; and, in one particularly generous review, the works of Edith Wharton and Henry James — I’ve never read.

I’m embarrassed to admit this. So often, I fear I haven’t read the right books or watched the right films; that my tastes are too broad or too narrow, my references plucked from pop culture at random. So this exercise, assembling five books (well, four books and one celebrity profile) that served as formative influences as I wrote my own, was as difficult as it was gratifying. While, of course, every book I’ve ever loved has in some way shaped my intellectual landscape, these are the texts I found myself coming back to as I wrote, parsing them to understand exactly how they worked or re-reading passages just to re-create a feeling. They range in genre and style, in subject and tone, but I can see echoes of all of them in my work; in short, they were useful to me, as I hope they can be to you.

Crush by Richard Siken

Sorry I name-check this book in nearly every interview, but it’s my all-time favorite and the book that made me want to write. I have a “Scheherezade” tattoo on my rib-cage in cursive; “Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake, and dress them in warm clothes again.” Fuck, it still hits. This book is a lyrical, formally inventive fever dream that traces a doomed relationship, and the whole (equally doomed) enterprise of young love. Imagined violence sullies fairy-tale landscapes; the camera keeps running, the car never stops. And eventually, we fall headlong off the cliff and gaze up at the glittering stars. When I was given this book by a friend, at sixteen, I’d never read anything like it. I sort of devoured, then learned to parrot Siken’s style in the way Didion did Hemingway, until eventually, after some years, I forged my own. Though I now mostly write fiction, I can still see echoes of a poetic sensibility largely honed by this book. Which is to say that not everything has to mean something. Some words are just there to evoke — the heat of a body, the threat of a night.

One of my favorite lines in Great Black Hope: “Wordlessly, Smith left the bathroom and reentered the party’s soft moan.” What exactly does that mean? Couldn’t tell you, wouldn’t try.

White Girls by Hilton Als

I was just rereading the André Leon Talley profile in this collection on the occasion of the (Black dandy-themed) Met Gala. White Girls is the kind of book that merits the word “ambitious:” a broad-ranging collection of essays, celebrity profiles, and memoir that probes the subject of white femininity and the particular affinity (amorous, envious) Black (gay) men have for white women. In this collection, “white girl” is a mode, a way-of-being, equally inhabited by Truman Capote as Michael Jackson as, at times, Als himself. Identity is a slippery, mutable thing — this collection suggests — but also something, as during the AIDS crisis in Als’s own experience, that can be violently re-articulated. I thought about this book a lot when crafting my protagonist Smith — a Black, gay man — particularly as regards his relationship with his closest friend, a wealthy white woman named Carolyn. I was interested in the idea that he was drawn to the particular way she performs white femininity, and the proximity to power that yields, but I was interested also in the idea that she might feel every bit as trapped by that performance as he does, constantly cast as the “respectable negro.”

Negroland by Margo Jefferson

In this memoir about growing up as a member of the Black bourgeoisie, what Jefferson captures so brilliantly is how the drive to achieve — and thereby disprove societal (read: white) expectations of one’s inferiority — can become a cancer. She is unsparing in airing the dirty laundry often brushed under the rug in the Black community: about hierarchies of class and color, and the often brutal ways these distinctions are upheld. Still, she avoids the salacious gossipy tone of other writers who’ve tried to capture this milieu (particularly Lawrence Otis Graham in Our Kind of People — a book which, in citing my high school, neighborhood, and many family friends, felt like it stopped just short of calling me out by name). There’s a generosity, tempered by critical rigor, that I admire immensely and sought to emulate in depicting that milieu.

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

Parts of Great Black Hope take place in courtrooms and police stations, but I wanted to resist easy genre conventions, at least on the level of tone, so I often returned to this book as a guide. In A Separation, the narrator’s estranged husband’s disappearance brings her to an arid, off season resort in Greece; the novel centers an investigation, a man has gone missing, but it never veers into crime thriller territory — a feat accomplished through the acuity of Kitamura’s observations and the cool elegance of her prose. She’s a master at constructing a sentence, at creating a feeling, and I often get chills reading her books. “Write a sentence as clean as a bone,” Baldwin instructs, something I — as more of a maximalist — can struggle to do. So sometimes, when heading to a cafe or the library to start my day, I’d listen back to passages from this book (and from Intimacies) to get those perfect rhythms back in my head. This helped me edit, cut fat. Write a sentence as clean as a bone.

“Chloë’s Scene” by Jay McInerney

Okay, so I’m cheating... this isn’t a book, but it is one of my favorite pieces of writing of all time, so PRINT IT. In my intro, I mentioned that I haven’t read Bright Lights, Big City, but McInerney was nonetheless a massive influence because of this piece: a 1994 profile of Chloë Sevigny for the New Yorker. There’s a sense of real glamour (organic, unadorned, not available for purchase) as well as peril in this portrait of the actress at 19. When not at her parents’ in the Connecticut suburbs, she bounces between flophouses and skaters’ apartments, even as she’s set to star in the now-iconic Larry Clark film Kids. She carries a beeper so that the Teamsters can track her down whenever she is needed on set. So much of the pleasure of this piece is in that searching quality, as McInerney — by then an aging “literary it boy,” quite literally chasing youth — trails Chloë between scenes: out all night at Tunnel, then a fitting for Maison Margiela the next afternoon. Pitch perfect in its details, this profile is a time capsule of that moment in New York, as punk and grunge gave way to ‘90s rave, three years before Michael Alig was sent to prison. And reading it now, I can see how much I stole — not the words but the feeling, and that vision of New York: tattered, ratty, elegant.