Jason P. Frank: I want to call attention to my favorite scene so far: the dinner with Carolyn and Elle. Suddenly Smith was not even treading water; he was out of his depth in terms of conversation, and I needed that moment where he was being left in the dust. And then Smith offends Caroyln without realizing what he's doing. That was such a useful way of explaining everyone involved in that situation.
Alison Willmore: He likes wounding Carolyn a little too, even if he didn't intend it. That is the first scene that really stresses the degree to which Smith sees his place in this world as precarious. If he's not hitched to one or both of these women, he himself maybe isn't bringing whatever he sees as the value that would allow him into these spaces. He has one foot in and enjoys being there, but also wants to look down on them, but also understands that he needs someone to bring him in.
This section juxtaposes two group sessions: Dr. Mancini's course and the first AA meeting that Smith attends with mostly white gay men. What did you make of these two ecosystems?
Tembe Denton-Hurst: Unfortunately, Dr. Mancini is my favorite person in the novel. I think he is so fucking funny. Characters like him only happen when they're just supposed to be fun and unserious, and I wish all of the characters in this book were like that. He didn't give a fuck. He literally was like, "I will never know your name, Smith. I don't know you. I don't care.” He's running this shadow economy, gaming the system.
Brandon Sanchez: Again, the stakes could not be lower, though. Smith is just like, Okay, I guess I have to do this thing. I thought that moment when he has to tell this perfunctory coming-out story was very funny, but there are still no real emotional stakes.
A.W.: The narration is focused on the pressures of the systemic, even in this pretty protected place, so it is funny to have a character who is just like, "No, it's your fault. You’ve got to shape up; you’ve got to try.”
Emma Alpern: I really want to talk about the tone. When I started this book a couple months ago, I put it down because I found it so florid. He uses the word Dementorial — we think it comes from the word Dementor from Harry Potter. When I was reading the book this time around, I couldn't stop hearing it in the voice of the main character from A Confederacy of Dunces, Ignatius J. Reilly — a very pretentious character who’s supposed to be funny and ridiculous.
The restaurant review that’s quoted on page 30 says the restaurant was known for serving a duck-egg fetus so rich it could be described as an “an experience of indulgence not unlike Tantalus’s first doomed taste of ambrosia.” It's so off the mark in such a funny way. This was something about the book that I didn’t know if I could handle. But the more I read, the more I thought it was nice to not be reading an autofictional novel. It's a totally different vocabulary in a way that's a little bit shocking, but in the end, I really ended up liking it.
Allison P. Davis: When you read that out loud, I immediately saw Patrick Bateman. I just watched American Psycho, and the best part of that movie is when Christian Bale's going to restaurants and reciting “this restaurant has a crab pasta …" It truly sounds like that.
A.W.: Smith describes food that he has enjoyed eating briefly, but with the aloofness that he's constantly affecting.
J.P.F.: Except that he hates fine dining!
A.W.: Actually, I love when he watches his dad care about where the ingredients come from and thinks it’s a grift.
I also enjoyed when he wakes up in a guy's bed and doesn’t know where he is and the guy rolls over and answers “with a word that Smith, in 2013, had never before heard but understood with a grim intuition: ‘Bushwick.’” Sometimes the elaborate, almost mannered prose can be very funny that way, and other times it does feel like it's unclear whether it's poking fun at him or meant to be taken on the level.
J.P.F.: I had a similar response where I was immediately put off by the prose. I don't love the M.F.A. style of writing — it's a little overly descriptive, very few sentences cut through anything. But at the same time, by the end of this section I felt it was effective for this character because that's how he talks, using a barrage of adjectives that will make you acquiesce to believing that he's right.
E.A.: But it made his world feel kind of made-up. Because I can't imagine somebody in our world calling someone, for instance, “sozzled.” Is he really out there saying these things, and are the people he's speaking to also talking this way?
T.D.H.: I want to talk about one funny thing: Smith kind of engages in this “all Black people are friends” situation when he meets the artist, Mona Ali, who is hostile toward his company but somehow sees Smith as a friendly face. Even though Mona seems to be astute in her reading of the tech company's intentions in trying to cannibalize her work, somehow it feels like Smith is friendly within that and can't be an agent of the state. Why is Mona just like, “Nigga, put on this headset”? He's literally an employee of this company that wants to extract her value, and she knows that.
A.P.D.: Would you have been more interested in that scene if it had been a “not all skinfolk are kinfolk” moment, where you see an oppositional energy between the two of them?
T.D.H.: Smith is not giving kinfolk energy. I have more in common with the agent at TSA than I have with you, Smith. I just feel like you can't be kinfolk and a white darling simultaneously.
A.P.D.: Unless you're addressing your ability to code switch, right? Or the world that asks him to code switch. But to your earlier point, there really is no awareness of other Black people.
J.P.F.: At some point, he says Elle and her friend have “ballroom” influence in their speech.
B.S.: Is that the same scene with the Dominique Deveraux reference?
A.P.D.: What did that mean? I couldn't figure out what that room looked like.
E.A.: When is this set, by the way?
A.W.: I don't think it's clear. Do we ever get anything that ties it to a specific point in time?
Knowing that this is based on the death of his friend in 2018, which is in the author’s note, I think we can assume it’s taking place then.
E.A.: Can we also talk about how the random dude is just named The Bronx?
T.D.H.: This is what I'm talking about, right? I think that that's what really irritates me. One of my favorite books I've read in the past five years is Erasure by Percival Everett, which does not shy away from having an upper-middle-class character who has open disdain for poor people. I feel like Smith starts to do that and then pulls back. How do you feel about these people? You can taxonomize everybody, but then, somehow, when it comes to people who are poor or people who are not like you in some way … Maybe he didn't want to punch down. But Rob is not Smith theoretically. If Smith has an opinion on everything else but this, it's very confusing.
B.S.: I like the brief flickers we get of people like, reading Smith to filth, like when his sister, Nia, tells him, "You always go for white guys who are going to disappoint you at some point so that you can feel superior."
A.W.: The dating stuff is the closest we get to overt judgment from him. I don't find the self-loathing especially interesting; it felt like something I'd read before. But when he talks about cringing at interracial couples where the Black partner is more attractive, I wished it had delved more into his idea of the sexual marketplace and how it has been formed for him with regard to race. But instead we go right from that observation directly into his own history in alphabetical order. Self-loathing is easier for the book to deal with than him making cringey or ugly observations about other people.
T.D.H.: And how does he figure into that? Is he the attractive partner with the ugly white partner? Has he always dated at his station or above?
Also: why don't you like Black men, Smith? Let's discuss it. He does not interrogate his seemingly natural relationship to an affinity for whiteness. He treats it as natural. You don't have any resentment toward the very system that has crafted the circumstances in which you exist. Or any awareness of that. The only reason we have respectability politics among Black people is because there is a standard against which we're fighting. To not examine whiteness in any way for 147 pages — your relationship to it and your desire to be with white men — is scary to me.
J.P.F.: When he talks about the queer sexual marketplace, it really threw into relief how devoid of technology this book is. You met all your boyfriends in person? A through N, and you didn't meet any of them on Grindr? That's so unrealistic to me in this era. There is a lack of interest in technology in a way that is kind of fascinating to me. It obviously exists in the world of the book, because he gets phone alerts about tabloid reporting on Elle. Would there also be speculation in Reddit threads? I was wondering if anyone else felt that.
A.W.: There's one section where he briefly mentions sex via apps, but mostly with the idea of it's unsexy because you've already negotiated what's going to happen.
T.D.H.: It feels like Rob as an author is almost wanting the book to be read in a hundred years, which I think is a problem.
B.S.: Yes, I think there is a way that timelessness gets fetishized in a lot of contemporary writing that speaks to our earlier discussion about perspective and chilliness and prose style. It defangs the emotional stakes because you're writing for posterity in a way that prevents you from really putting some meat on the bones of whatever time you're living through. It’s easy to lose sight of whatever social totality you're trying to capture. But at the same time, I'm sympathetic to the approach to social media here because that is such a difficult needle to thread. And there's a whole other conversation about internet novels and how you reconcile social media with the formal constraints of the novel.
J.P.F.: But Smith is so obsessed with how he comes off that I'm like, What does your Instagram look like?
E.A.: There are people I follow on social media who will only ever post a video of swaying grass in the breeze on their Story — that's how I imagine his.
T.D.H.: This man is absolutely butt cheeks spread open in the Hamptons but is posting pictures of, like, the food that he ate.
Aperol Spritzes.
A.W.: He would see it as too thirsty to post pictures with high-profile friends. Even though he is so aware of status, I feel like he wouldn't want the appearance of wanting it too much.
T.D.H.: I wish there was some more desperation in this novel. For all of its desire to get away from Black respectability politics, I wish that we just were honest about the desperation for white approval, because that's really what we're looking at. As a Black reader, I see it very clearly in a way that I don't know that readers who are not Black would notice. He paints them as almost raceless in a way that feels very visible to me.
A.W.: That was on my mind with the A through N of his past relationships, especially that last one, when he finally gets the aggression or microaggression that he's always waiting for. It gives you a glimpse into his anger and insecurity, but it’s not the introspection that I was really wanting. Why do you crave this so much that you need to hurl yourself into this pattern of needing to be desired by the same type of white guy again and again but also seek out that moment of them breaking things?
T.D.H.: We're so close to the character it feels like we can't invite that kind of analysis because Smith would have to have that analysis. Since we don't have varying perspectives, we can't even know if Rob Franklin is aware, because Smith and Rob are twinned and we don’t have that pullback.
