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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A historic presidential campaign changes the trajectory of a young Black man's life in the highly anticipated debut novel from one of The New Yorker 's rising stars.
"Brilliantly written, piercingly smart, quietly subversive, Great Expectations will be one of the talked-about novels of the year."--Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin , winner of the National Book Award
"Vinson Cunningham's novel is a coming-of-age story that captures the soul of America."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post
I'd seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency.
When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator's idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he'll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States' first Black president.
Great Expectations is about David's eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions--questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood--that force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.
Meditating on politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family, Great Expectations is both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas, marking the arrival of a major new writer.
Author Notes
Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. He co-hosts the podcast "Critics at Large" and his writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine , The New York Times Book Review , The Fader , Vulture , The Awl, and McSweeney's . A former staffer on Barack Obama's first presidential campaign and in his White House, Cunningham has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Yale School of Art, and Columbia University's School of the Arts. He lives in New York City.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
New Yorker staff writer Cunningham debuts with a sophisticated bildungsroman that draws on his work for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. His narrator, David, is a Black man in his early 20s, adrift in Chicago and searching for role models, having neglected his early academic promise after unexpectedly becoming a father and subsequently flunking out of college. Beverly, a leading Black businesswoman whose middle-schooler son David tutors in English and math, connects him with the campaign of an Obama-like politician known only as "the Senator." David keenly longs for something to believe in, but despite his brushes on the campaign trail with Cornel West and other leading Black figures, his work mainly consists of selling tickets to fund-raising dinners and arranging staged meetings between the Senator and voters. The political plot is secondary--readers know the campaign will, like Obama's, follow a victorious arc--freeing Cunningham to shine in David's recollections of his upbringing in a Pentecostal church run by a charismatic pastor who bears some resemblance to the Senator. More than a chronicle of idealism and disillusionment, this is an extended exploration of the power and limits of believing in something bigger than oneself. Cunningham's remarkable first novel matches the scale of its namesake. (Mar.)
Booklist Review
No need to name the senator from Illinois running for president in 2008. The narrator's astute descriptions leave no doubt as to his identity as he finds himself working for the campaign. A Black New Yorker raised in a Pentecostal church who lost his father at age 10 and an aspiring writer who dropped out of college after getting his dancer girlfriend pregnant, then dumping her, David is working as a private tutor when his glamorous employer makes the connection. Soon he finds himself meeting celebrities, hobnobbing with Black elites on Martha's Vineyard, bunking in a moldering trailer in New Hampshire, navigating Iowa, partying in L.A., and witnessing the victory speech of the first Black president of the U.S. in Chicago, all while pondering tightrope questions of faith, power, morality, charisma, and politics with finesse and depth. David's ruminations over family, home, race, religion, literature, basketball, music, class, identity, accountability, and what it takes to be a genuine leader are fused with memories and tricky situations, every set piece saturated with feelings and fresh and provocative insights. Cunningham, a writer for the New Yorker and former staffer on Barack Obama's first presidential campaign and in the White House, has written an electrifying first novel and bildungsroman of consummate artistry and sensitivity, honed vision and wit.
Kirkus Review
A young man reckons with race, family, and disillusionment on a presidential campaign. David, the narrator of Cunningham's elegant and contemplative debut, is a 20-something Black man who in 2007 has stumbled into a minor role on the fundraising team for a U.S. senator and upstart presidential candidate. (He's unnamed, but it's plainly Barack Obama.) David needs something to believe in: A young father, he's flunked out of college and is making ends meet by tutoring. Even so, the campaign's high-flown hope-and-change rhetoric is a world removed from his job greeting wealthy donors, accepting checks, and helping to arrange more meet-and-greets. So he contemplates how he fits in as he scrutinizes the backgrounds of the high-dollar donors and celebrity boosters, particularly the Black ones. (Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and André Leon Talley have brief cameos.) The campaign's conclusion is no surprise, of course, but the book is alive in its intellectual detours, with Cunningham considering religion, race, sex, film, politics, fatherhood, and more. (David's memories are particularly affecting when it comes to music, especially his experience singing in church.) The tone of these asides is essayistic--Cunningham is a cultural critic at the New Yorker--yet none of them feel stapled-on. Rather, the campaign offers a sensible springboard for contemplation of pretty much everything. As David's mentor, Beverly, tells him, "The real thing is: How about you get some power and then use it?" She's talking about Black leadership, but her comment also relates to David's sense of self. Cunningham's choice of title is nervy, but though the story only vaguely echoes Dickens (Beverly is Havisham-adjacent), it perfectly encapsulates the kinds of anxiety that follow a smart young man still coming into being. Why let a perfectly good title go to waste? A top-shelf intellectual bildungsroman. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.