I remember meeting Barack Obama on his first campaign. I was then fourteen, newly come into a string-bean body that the senator from Illinois was quick to comment on—“you’ll be as tall as your father soon”—with an avuncular familiarity that struck me even then as strange—I did not know this man—though perhaps, it should have been my first indication that this was a strategic operator, one who indeed was going to win.
The first time David Hammond, the narrator of Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel Great Expectations (Hogarth, 2024),pays any “real attention” to Obama (or his proxy, as he is never named), it is 2007, the day of the candidate’s televised announcement of a run for president. Hyper-analytical and erudite, David looks upon the young, Black senator and, in his speech, hears echoes of a pastor from his Pentecostal youth—a certain “black pulpit touch” that he finds flattering, “being pandered to so directly by someone who so nakedly wanted something in return.”
The senator wants, needs, support, and to earn it is displaying a fluency in a vernacular legible to the Black voting bloc yet subtle enough not to alienate those outside it: a balancing act of impeccable precision. However, it is not just this churchy figure who comes to David’s mind, not just Lincoln or “more gingerly” King, but John Winthrop, that Puritan colonizer who gazed upon the green breast of New England and set out to build a “city on the hill,” some golden promise of American empire.
At the novel’s outset, David is living in the shadows of that empire. A twenty-one-year-old college dropout and unmarried new father, he has left rural Vermont for his native New York, where he makes a meager living as a private tutor. In the booming pre-crisis city, he is mystified and amused by those conversant in the language of empire – people who speak of macroeconomics, the price of the euro and the vicissitudes of the housing market, mistakenly, as machinations which have something to do with him.
One such person is Beverly Whitlock, the mother of his sole tutoring client. A card-carrying member of the city’s Black elite, she is a graduate of Harvard Law who works in finance and is successful enough to have once graced the cover of Black Enterprise. She has also taken on an informal role, fundraising for the campaign of the charismatic senator, an acquaintance of hers from Harvard. Having found the aimless David competent enough at tutoring (and perhaps also out of some tribal fealty), Beverly recruits him as a fundraising assistant.
The structure of the novel once he joins is basically picaresque, trailing David through the many locales—cocktail parties and conferences and in the field, from New Hampshire to California—where campaigns are lost and won. In each, interactions with what a politician might call “ordinary Americans,” as well as wealthy donors and eventually with the candidate himself, provide impetus for David’s thoughtful meditations on racial progress, class striving, and the impenetrability of the American dream.
In these scenes, he is more observer than actor, spurts of free association that at times recalled the work of Rachel Cusk, particularly because the absence of names (Obama is alternately referred to as “the senator” and “the candidate,” while Hillary Clinton is referred to rarely and simply as “her”) gives the near-historical novel a fabulist feel. But David’s roving eye is most grounded when directed inward, at his own history: his on-again-off-again relationship with organized religion as well as with the mother of his infant daughter, whose every mention smarts with still-tender hurt.
Of the many thematic throughlines that surface from Cunningham’s masterful prose, perhaps the most salient is the duality of politics and religion, the notion of “predestination,” which early on, David distinguishes from destiny. “The latter word,” he explains, recalling the teachings of his former pastor, “despite what it shared in etymology with the former, contained no implication of an Author. The truth, he said, was that your life—and this was freedom—was a gesture minutely choreographed by God.”
It is this predestination that has led David via Beverly onto the campaign and eventually into her arms as a lover. And it is this predestination that delivers him through the many scandals that ensnare others, allowing his steady ascent. One of the few moments of dramatic tension in this relatively frictionless novel comes when David, drunk-driving home after a round of free beers on the campaign trail in New Hampshire, encounters a cop car that trails him. His passenger seat companion, a blue-blooded staffer named Howland, proceeds to have a white liberal attack of aphasia:
“I know—well, no, that’s not true: I don’t know. I have heard, I have read, I’ve tried to be aware that this whole thing—a situation like this one—is scarier—not, like, personally, I don’t know, but maybe historically—scarier for you than it might be for me.”
But of course, they get off scot-free.
While this divinely choreographed path can render the plot a bit too smooth at times, Cunningham sustains interest by rendering David a kind of mirror for the senator, who appears likewise anointed, untouchable, curiously immune to consequence. There is the controversy over his spotted history (“He did fucking coke . . .and now he’s . . . this.”) and the company he keeps: a viral video in which his pastor, loudly and with a libidinal passion known to anyone raised in Black church, proclaims “God damn America.” But like any heir apparent, the senator walks through muck in a white suit and comes out clean.
Now a staff writer and critic for the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham began his career in politics, working first on the Obama campaign and then as a White House staffer. As such, he—and his narrator, who seemingly shares an identical biography—are well aware of the many machinations and hours (weeks, years) of tedious labor that are churned to produce the appearance of magic. And Cunningham’s novel is most compelling in the moments that dramatize that alchemy, the senator’s lineless skin peeled back to reveal gristle.
In these scenes, the senator is surly, rude, boastful. He admonishes David—powerless, really—for packing the campaign events too tightly, an endless parade of being treated like a “cardboard-cutout” for people’s pictures. He demands his props when he aces a speech, evincing that “good boy flair” read as performative by some of the staffers, foot soldiers under the banner of Hope. Beverly is one such supporter-critic, riding the wave of her “in” with a major donor to a position on the campaign of some power—or something merely resembling it.
Cunningham also deftly depicts how people are discarded as soon as they prove liabilities or are simply no longer useful. One such example comes early on, in the form of Cornel West (one of the few figures named rather than simply gestured toward). David recalls meeting West backstage at an early campaign event at the Apollo, then drifts back in time to hearing the professor speak at Princeton, then forward to after the senator’s win, at which point he “stopped returning West’s calls, and when the inauguration came, the professor couldn’t even score a ticket.” David describes this rift, which played out in semi-public, as both ideological—the senator, now President, failing to live up to “the special debt he owed to black people”— and as a kind of “jilted love.”
These individuals are discarded, of course, because politics is loyal not to people or ideals but to power. There is the power of money and its capacity to corrupt—money that flows often from the pockets of wealthy white men but sheds some green onto any hand it touches. There is the power of numbers, of the disparate ships that come together in a tide. And there is the power of myth, of magic. That thing that glimmers and makes gods of regular men.
Late in the novel, in a climactic scene at a fundraiser in Los Angeles, David is star-struck—perhaps for the first time, even after months of brushing shoulders with celebrities and millionaires—when he encounters a Pentecostal megachurch preacher on the lawn. He intercepts the old man and, in a moment of uncharacteristic directness, asks why he, a man of the cloth who has publicly denounced politics as a “distraction from the work of holiness,” would spend thousands of dollars for a few moments with the candidate.
“Something is shifting, son,” the old man answers, intimating “a move of God’ in the campaign that [can’t] be explained in purely political terms.” The senator, he believes, is on the cusp of something transcendent, a win that will usher in an “age in which miracles would become commonplace.”
Some transformation is complete: the senator-now-candidate-now-nominee has caught an earthly wave onto the shores of pure symbol. But, as history has shown, even great waves must eventually crash.
