Upward Mobility, still Tenuous

In the upscale East Hamptons of Long Island, a young man is at a party, snorts some coke, and then gets arrested for possession. This being his first offense, he eventually is required to attend addiction classes. 

The title gives you a clue, but it’s only many pages in that you realize the young man, David Smith, is black. The novel is from his point of view (in the third person) and very fittingly, he simply sees himself as a person. He does not comment on his shade of brown or his hair. There are occasional hints of his ethnicity from the way he sees other characters:

At a party, a red headed actress from family money said she was disappointed in him for selling out rather than reinterpreting Brecht in a Tenderloin trap house or whatever she planned to do, and when he replied that he needed to pay off student loans, she’d immediately gone white — well, whiter. Of course, she said. 

Further pages on, the reader realizes that David is gay. 

They [wealthy, white] looked to Smith — as to the other brown, queer interlopers who passed through their parties — as a guide to an exotic landscape.

David does not feel defined by his race or sexuality, but both those facts define him to other people, even in multicultural New York. It becomes obvious that the many young white partyers who snorted coke did not get arrested. They can afford to dress shabbily, he cannot.

Entwined in the thread of David’s arrest and its aftermath is the story of David’s best friend, Elle, who was found dead of an overdose. David and Elle had bonded in college over a shared identity, and were roommates before Elle’s disappearance, but David discovers that he is privy to only parts of Elle’s life despite their closeness.

Rob Franklin is a keen observer and the writing can make you chuckle out loud. David works as a ‘content strategist’:

“I’m looping with Hemlock today at 6 and want to at least have a blanked deck to walk the through ahead of Máxime and the content leads tomorrow, so can you shoot pver last months KPIs before EOD?” Smith took a second to parse the sentence, one typical of her speech in that it referenced a number of proper nouns and acronyms spoken at such a velocity he could barely extract its meaning.

Among the most entertaining parts of the book are David’s addiction treatment sessions, which are portrayed with biting clarity. The counselor is only too eager to fit David into a box.

On gay shit, Mancini [the addiction counsellor] was unsure how to proceed. “That sounds very difficult”, he pronounced slowly. “And your father? Was he around?” [Mancini] was incorporating this into a working narrative: the gay Black boy with the absentee father. The contemptible single mother. He’d seen the trailer for Moonlight, he knew all about this.

The author can be perceptive, and also show David’s vulnerability. When his two friends Elle and Carolyn meet:

he understood finally that he hadn’t been keeping them apart out of fear that they wouldn’t get along but rather fear that they would get along so well that they would have no use for him.

This is the subtlest book about identity that I’ve read. David is never a stereotype: he is black, but his parents are middle class and still married, he went to an expensive liberal arts college (not identified, but sounds like Columbia). He may make out with other young men at parties, but that’s never the focus of the novel, it’s more a microscopic social scrutiny. 

A desire to have been there, done that before anyone else and to be dubbed a “tastemaker” as a result was not unique to her but an increasingly common mode to engage with “experience”, a set of jeweled objects to be collected.

And yet, race (more than sexuality, which is probably a reflection of the NYC society in which he moves) inevitably plays a part. When Smith meets his beautiful white friend Carolyn:

He wondered [..] what it would be like to be his own aesthetic opposite, to have his body be so tethered to the age-old markers of beauty, class and desire as to be the default center of any room.

Section 2 goes back to David’s family, puts his background into perspective, and draws a line from the past to the present. David’s grandmother Gale grew up in small town Texas and saw a favorite cousin lynched because he was too uppity. As soon as she could, Gale left for Houston and fought her way through law school. As a lawyer,she had leapt into the middle class, and her four children were pushed and prodded to their own success through Ivy League schools and professional accomplishments. Now, David’s mother is a doctor, and his father is a college professor. 

But there is no resting on laurels here. All these older black professionals are fiercely determined to make sure their children maintain this level of success, so hard won and yet so precarious. David’s recent arrest and arraignment has put his future in jeopardy. He is laid off, but can’t apply for new jobs in case they do a background check. 

For David’s family, every little thing counts. At the arraignment, David and his father make sure to shave and wear nice suits and behave exactly as prescribed by their lawyer. Meanwhile, David’s white friends continue to party, enjoy cocaine and heroin, without event. 

The author uses a lot of current slang and (possibly invented?) phrases, which can leave the reader puzzled or amused.

bell hooks beliebers

there would be no Cabbage Patching from his audience

become a Crop Over queen

I didn’t get some of them, and some of the threads are more interesting than other, but I was ok with all of that because the book is a very enjoyable and illuminating read nevertheless.

---