GREAT EXPECTATIONS, by Vinson Cunningham
As much as I pretend that I’m too conscientious, too emancipated, too Black and mostly just too lazy to succumb to a cult, the aesthetic choices I made in 2008 — when a distressed white tee featuring Shepard Fairey’s rendering of Barack Obama was an essential part of my wardrobe — remind me I ain’t that special. Still, I had company. “Great Expectations,” Vinson Cunningham’s brolic and dazzlingly written debut novel, transports us to that time, when America’s most valuable commodity was proximity — real or perceived; burgeoning or dimming — to the soon-to-be president.
Cunningham, a staff writer at The New Yorker who worked, in his 20s, on the Obama campaign and in his White House, ferries us through a year in the orbit of an Obama-like figure known to us only as the Senator and then the Candidate. (And let’s get this out of the way: “Obama-like” is a misnomer. This isn’t an interpretation, like Jeff Bridges’ Clintonesque Jackson Evans from “The Contender” or even the Clinton-adjacent Jed Bartlet on “The West Wing.” Dissimilarities between the fabricated Candidate and the flesh-and-blood Obama are nonexistent.)
And maybe “ferries” is the wrong word, too, because “Great Expectations” moves, in 249 quick pages, with propulsive energy, pausing the barnstorm to consume and deconstruct the sights along the way.
David Hammond is brilliant but rudderless, a college dropout and single dad thrust into the Candidate’s circle thanks to the elusive, shrewd and (increasingly, as the book continues) sexy Beverly Whitlock — a benefactor-slash-rabbi-slash-whoever-the-hell-she-wants-to-be, with one of those nebulous finance gigs where you’re never quite sure how they make all that money but always dead certain they wouldn’t hesitate to bury you with it. We’re quickly introduced to staffers and canvassers; to fund-raisers and their targets; to celebrity academics and scions of music moguls, all thirsty to be validated.
Cunningham captures the grind and the mundanity of the campaign with precision and humor, and via the incorporation of staff-specific shorthand. “Airplane rules,” David repeats to a crowd waiting in line to pass through the Apollo Theater’s metal detectors.
A supervisor later reminds him to look at the audience’s faces, and not the Candidate’s, at speaking engagements, to better know “which ones you could ask for a check.” Cunningham answers myriad questions I’ve always had, but never asked, such as “Where do young staffers sleep when stationed in new cities?” (Trailer parks, highway motels — anywhere with a cheap and friendly bed.) And: “How often do they hook up?” (Define “often.”)
The latter happens to David during a short but (non-saccharinely) sweet tryst with a fellow staffer in New Hampshire that generates a lucid exploration of the self-consciousness and messy neuroses some heterosexual men bring to sex. “The only real skill that’s portable from one person to the next is maybe openness,” David’s partner suggests to alleviate his anxiety about entering the bedroom without a rubric for guaranteed success.
The book especially floats when Cunningham — who, like David, is Black — explores the social lexicon of intra-racial hierarchy. Surrounding the Candidate — well, not quite always surrounding, but wishing to surround him — are the sort of Black people who use “summer” as a verb. The Martha’s Vineyard Blacks. The Hollywood-with-cocaine-connections Blacks. The big-money-Manhattan-Cobb-salad Blacks. All grasping (and paying) for the Candidate’s attention like a plover bird lurking around a crocodile’s mouth. And most of them the product of generations of passed brown paper bag tests.
It’s striking how none of these people even feign interest in the potential for America’s spiritual transformation that the Candidate’s messaging promises. No, that performance of interest in piety was for white people. (And, I guess, Black people with T-shirts.)
Embedded throughout the novel is David’s relationship to Christianity, and, just as frequent, Christianity’s relationship to him, often told through the Epistle-like back stories of his family and his church — a counterbalance to the messianic draw of the Candidate and the nakedly transactional soullessness of his wealthy flock.
While I appreciated the texture of these hermeneutics, each time Cunningham moved away from the urgent present of the campaign and David’s close but amorphous connection with Beverly, it lost momentum. Also, with autofiction that incorporates so many obvious allusions to famous people — and some actual real people are named here, too — why this instead of a memoir? It’s a curiosity I had, but a mid-novel change in a central relationship solved it for me.
Of course, a book entitled “Great Expectations” will draw comparisons between David Hammond and Dickens’s Pip. Yes, coming-of-age stories are familiar. From Malcolm Little to Forrest Gump, American literature is filled with common young men who find themselves, through chance and serendipity, immersed in the slippery world of choice and privilege.
Rarer is a debut that announces a talent like Cunningham’s. This is a writer who clearly loves Black people. But this affection is also a challenge. A charge to interrogate the social and spiritual cost of currency. And a reminder not to look at the Candidate’s face for answers.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS | By Vinson Cunningham | Hogarth | 249 pp. | $28
