- This is a debut novel from a young Black American gay writer. It's about the challenges the narrator and his friends constantly face just trying to survive in New York. They are well educated but have rather meaningless jobs in the corporate sphere, and spend most of their nights in the many bars and clubs that really define their lives. Drugs of course are commonplace.
- It's a real challenge to read though, mainly because of Franklin's prose. Although very stylish and slick it's frequently pretentious. He's addicted to uncommon words. Here's an example:
...in college, they'd only come into occasional contact and, even in New York, seemed to pertain to variant slivers of the same milieu. That first postgrad summer in the city, Smith had zealously architected their distance: dinner with Carolyn and the friends with whom she'd grown up...then drinks with...the sleek, swart set to which they belonged...He'd watch their polite conversations from afar with a sense of mute anxiety, fearful that theirs would be a combustible union.
One day that first autumn, Smith awoke to rain, its soft patter percussive against all the city's cars.
- But, to be fair, sometimes the prose is just gorgeous:
The day grew fat in its middle, then burned off in crimson wisps - the surprise of sunset arriving through a far window and engulfing every ordinary thing in gold.
- Deep into the novel various storylines emerge that are very satisfying. And the friends and their families become very likeable. The narrator, David Smith Jr, gets charged with cocaine possession and is forced to undergo counselling, his flatmate Elle is found dead on the banks of a river, his friend Carolyn gets so sucked into the New York party scene she becomes alcohol and drug addicted and disappears. They are young, rich, party animals, ‘upwardly mobile urbanites’. 'Nothing good happens after midnight'.
- In one section we're taken back to the South in 1942 and his parents' challenges. They are 'negroes'. Crack is becoming popular and Black kids getting longer jail sentences. It's ‘…a lifetime of dissonance, of alternately stunted and impossible expectations…’
- Franklin has written a love letter to New York:
...the mink-hatted older ladies walking their terriers on the Upper East Side; and down, down, in Midtown, where suits emerged from their gray-slat towers like tidal waves of minnows, their manic lunch-break motion some brief reprieve.
- Surprisingly, he makes no mention at all of key events of the time - 9/11, Obama, the Black Lives Matter movement, or even the experience of racism, subtle or overt. It's about the depth and meaning of personal friendships, and the comfort of welcoming social locales.
- And it turns out to be a very satisfying read in the end.
