Book Review: Vinson Cunningham's Brilliant 'Great Expectations'

It's ambitious to title your first novel “Great Expectations.” Regardless of the immediate reference to Dickens's classic coming-of-age novel, you are setting the stakes high. That being said, be bold or go home? New Yorker magazine editor and theater critic Vinson Cunningham takes that risk with his highly autobiographical and vividly performed novel, “Great Expectations.”

After failing college in Vermont, our narrator David is unleashed. In his early 20s, he lost the religion of his youth and returned to his mother's apartment “just south of Columbia University, in those blocks between 100 and 110 where the Upper West Side begins to gently merge into Morningside Heights.” ”. He is a young father, estranged from the mother of his daughter, who also returned from college to New York City. As David struggles to take classes at City University and keep his job as a tutor, his youthful potential feels like a memory. Despite all this, that shine is not completely lost.

At the beginning of the book, David remembers, “I sat alone, screaming in the far woods of North Central Park, watching the Senator on television.” He is watching the inauguration speech of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. Although Cunningham never uses his name, it is clear from both the broad strokes and the details that this is the future 44th president. “He spoke before the pillars of the Illinois House of Representatives, where, something like a century and a half earlier, Abraham Lincoln had performed the same ritual,” David observes. “The senator brought his elegant wife and his young daughters onto the stage when he made his entrance. A U2 song played as they greeted.”

It is with this release that Cunningham begins to show two people ready to begin a great journey. For a time, their paths will intertwine. Both men face incredible odds and both follow a path that will take them to the White House. The book shares this heady tension of aspiration, charisma, optimism, incredible opportunity and intellectual curiosity, as well as a longing for connection.

David may be lost, but he is not forgotten. “Despite myself, and not without some reservations, I believe in luck, in coincidences, in the meaningless harmony of certain sequences,” he observes. “Take the one where I arrived at the senator's campaign, just a month or so after seeing his big speech.” Beverly, who “had once appeared on the cover of black company magazine” and was a member of the board of directors at his high school, “where people still vaguely remembered me and liked me,” hired him as a tutor for his teenage son, after learning that he had “gone off track.” Beverly, quickly sensing that David was overqualified and understimulated, offers him an irresistible opportunity. The senator's campaign was looking for “anyone young and competent,” and with questions that serve more as statements, she gets him an interview with the campaign that quickly leads to a job on the fundraising committee.

This impulse constantly carries David throughout the book. Based on his thoughts, he is a serious and thoughtful young man. His observations: from colleagues (“Everyone here dressed like bankers or lawyers. I had worn my boxy black suit with a slight shine on the elbows”), from donors (“I realized that this made him like me more. I had helped to make me”), of immigrants (“When I told him how much this guy has change throughout his life, they guided him through how much effort this man has put into himself, that's what conquered him”), they weave the story of a period of hope. Following an introduction to the campaign event by Cornel West, David reflects, not ironically, that “This candidacy was a rare example of 'radical love' made real.” It's funny to look back and say that 2007 was a simpler time, but 17 years later, it's easy to recognize that we live in a more cynical world. David's journey brings us back to that moment through the meetings that maintained the financial backbone of the campaign.

And yet, what is compelling is that David's innocence is not impeccable. His rush toward adulthood—missed opportunities, early fatherhood—forced him to see difficult truths. At her tender age, she longs for the simplicity of religion and the church songs she sang with her late father, whose death (“in a small hospital downtown, where nuns watched over the political deaths of plague victims” ) was enveloped in silence. . After his death “the world continued to run. The night of his funeral I wrote a song.” Is it any wonder that he is a person who needs a hero?

Captured by this longing, Cunningham takes a fast-paced cinematic story and infuses it with the texture of humanity. His ability to make art and find beauty in the smallest moments is the work of not only a skilled novelist but also a moving critic. Of Central Park, David reflects: “It had always seemed like a place to get lost in, experienced step by step, in a series of developing images, something that could not be assimilated with a single possessive gaze.” Life, like fiction, is often at its best when you surrender to being lost. Although alchemy occurs through an accumulation of details, life is lived in the moment.

However, such deep and intimate details raise questions of access and investigation. A quick look at Cunningham's biography reveals that she also worked on the Obama campaign and for the administration. Beyond that, her life shares considerable similarities with David's. Such proximity to history leads one to wonder why Cunningham didn't decide to write a memoir.

But, again, there is a breadth to fiction that elevates ideas and possibilities above a strict adherence to facts and truth. We could draw on our memories to resurrect a documentary-style memory of Obama's first presidential campaign. However, what emerges from this novel is much more than the sum of its brilliant details, hence the benefit of working outside of memoir. David echoes this reasoning, admitting: “I was less interested in the campaign's argument than in how I was supposed to interpret it. Less in its details than in its total codified meaning.”

We too look at the total encoded meaning that links David to this journey. Cunningham's attention to the subtle and shared mysteries of life speaks volumes beyond a blow-by-blow analysis of this historical moment. The author is direct when David admits: “I wanted to be real in a way that the story wasn't, and listening to the new president I realized that I still didn't know how, I couldn't understand where to start. .” The story is, in essence, a collection of stories that speak of mythology, power and desire. When real life becomes history, we lose a part of ourselves. David (and Cunningham) explore the lives that match the story as black men in America, as people gifted with faith, and as individuals striving to surpass anyone's wildest dreams.

Lauren LeBlanc is a member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle.