Great Black Hope: Mistakes Were Made
An Audacious Book Club Discussion
Great Black Hope opens with David Smith, a queer black Stanford graduate, getting arrested for cocaine possession by plainclothes police officers.Luckily for him, he gets released quickly and his parents help him find a lawyer. Rob Franklin does such a great job of making the reader feel not only the precarity and tension of the situation, but also the shame Smith feels about his family, friends, and colleagues finding out about what happened.
What do you think about this novel’s premise and David Smith, our protagonist?
Have you ever had a really bad fuck-up, one where you had to confront your reality contradicting what people expected of you? How did you handle it both in the immediate aftermath and beyond? Did you have access to any privileges or support systems to help you through? Have you ever had the chance to be there for someone else? If you’re a parent, have you thought about what you’d do if one of your kids were in real trouble? If you’ve come out the other end of a solid fuck-up, what helped you recover? What do you wish you could tell to a younger, possibly stupider, version of yourself?
I can honestly say I've never experienced a real, solid, life-changing world-wrecking fuckup, and I think I'm quite scared to ever even come close to one, so I've mostly avoided anything that might present the opportunity. It's not that I don't believe my family and other support systems would help me if I asked, but from experience with seeing how they process other people's smaller fuckups or even norm deviations (queer? unmarried? not religious?), I know that the resource/material support would be there, but also judgement. I don't think they can always help it -- I can't always help judging, either, so maybe I should try to have some compassion for that. It is an overwhelming and unexpected amount of work to support someone through a crisis. At the same time, some part of me would appreciate the safety net of having a support system that openly acknowledges the reality of fuckups and the fact that there can be an aftermath, even if there's a lot of pain involved.
This answers none of those questions, but I loved how a few days after the "incident" (as his family calls it), he called his sister, told her all the details and let her tell his parents. Family dynamics are always so interesting to me. Who is the bearer of bad news? Who is responsible for bringing the family together? I'm about halfway through and I haven't really seen the sister appear again except for her role as messenger. I'm not sure what this says about Smith either, that he felt it was too daunting to tell his parents and had to ask his sister to do it.