GREAT BLACK HOPE

A son of the Black bourgeoisie grapples with the limits of his privilege.

“In the grand scheme of history, it was nothing”: That’s the opening of this smart, scintillating debut novel, as 20-something queer protagonist David Smith pockets 0.7 grams of cocaine—“what might have looked like a matchbook or stick of gum to an unwitting child”—at a Hamptons nightspot. Smith’s arrest by plainclothes officers moments later will set off an intense personal reckoning, coming, as it does, less than a month after the death of his best friend and roommate, Elle England, from what appears to be a drug overdose; the tragedy has been tabloid fodder ever since her body was discovered in a Bronx park, miles from their Brooklyn apartment. Smith, son of a retired HBCU president, and Elle, daughter of a 1990s neo-soul singer, are in a coterie of bright young things that also includes Carolyn Astley, a well-heeled blond having an affair with a trendy married chef. (The opening of his pretentious restaurant, Inducio, is one of the novel’s many deliciously mordant set pieces.) Carolyn dabbles in AA, and Smith himself harbors a “lingering suspicion…that indeed he had a problem: some unnameable ache that would eat him alive.” As he awaits his court date, he’ll attend a series of perfunctory group treatment sessions on Skype, then head south to Atlanta for Christmas with his family (for whom he is a “liability to be managed,” he thinks) and spend hours driving amid the landmarks of his childhood, reflecting on the “Black kids who’d grown up as he did, with professional mothers and ever-present fathers, lessons in lacrosse and piano—who’d bottomed out young on some compulsion to self-destruct.” Subjects that might make for solemn reading are rendered thoroughly absorbing by the author’s radiant prose and razor-sharp observations.

A captivating novel of dissolution and redemption.