A Comic Novel That Tests the Limits of Black Upward Mobility

A Comic Novel That Tests the Limits of Black Upward Mobility

GREAT BLACK HOPE, by Rob Franklin The sentences in Rob Franklin’s strong debut novel, “Great Black Hope,” have a curious way of expanding to fit ever more jokes. One character wears “an oversize blazer she’d ‘borrowed’ from her boss — and indeed looked a bit like a mom, or a mum, as she called it, though more of the Paltrow-brownstone variety, minder of a bespectacled toddler named Timbre.” Another “had celebrity teeth, meaning fake, too big and…