The Brooklyn Rail

“Elephants have memories. Humans have pencils.”

At the top of his recently-released debut novel, Great Expectations, Vinson Cunningham offers this line to us in the voice of the narrator’s childhood choir director, recounted in a long-away memory. The proverb comes as one of many in a long list of epigrams imparted to him which emphasize a dutiful work ethic, and an aim towards excellence. It may be true. In Great Expectations Cunningham carefully chronicles an era gone by, deeply colored for us as a vivid memory itself.

Cunningham, an alum of President Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and subsequent White House, reimmerses us in the full swing of that first race to November. Great Expectations’s topline narrative is focused on the landmark campaign of an unnamed Black senator from Illinois, as experienced by a young Black staffer working the campaign, coming to the job with curious eyes, new to electoral politics.

Great Expectations maintains the aspirant voice of the early Obama campaign: teetering anxiety coupled with an almost fantastical leap towards American optimism. It’s difficult at first to hold onto a sense of urgency, or stakes, coming from the hopeful bid for president racing speedily towards its early-November fate. It’s a campaign that feels so familiar, calling back to that first Obama race. Its fate, fictionalized for us with sage memory, feels almost surely predetermined—and that’s intentional. Cunningham does not shy away from clear allusions to Hillary Clinton or John McCain figures as the candidate’s (oh so respectfully referred to as “The Senator” throughout the novel) opposition on the trail; and Cunningham concretely name drops the younger Bush, Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, and other recurrent figures of the time.

However, Great Expectation’s success comes when you look beyond the lights and the flashy things, and glance down towards the campaign’s junior staff and the grass roots that they tug at. It’s through the rotating carousel of old schoolteachers and choir directors, of New Hampshire voters and supporter housing hosts, and the numerous individuals of memory or encounter that David—Great Expectation’s narrator, working on the campaign’s fundraising team—interacts with along his way, all framed by the looming giant of a presidential campaign, that we are able to glean a better understanding of what’s going on here. The weight and the arrogance, the optimism and the ignorance—the divinity and the quotidian.

The shine is almost blinding; you have to look deeper.

Secretly I sided with the organizers.… In New England I’d been close, or felt close, to figuring out something else: the history and fulfillment of a feeling. You couldn’t quite pick that up on the news.

Throughout Cunningham’s novel, we cling to a small cast of finance staff, watching as they grow adept at stroking egos, navigating petty politics, and securing the bag. As they move along with the shimmering spectacle of the campaign, we’re halted by the interruption of everyday Americans along their path. Their anecdotes offer something clarifying to us; but Cunningham is determined not to let us off so easily. With each optimistic stroll towards “the people,” there is a hard pivot back towards the hubris which would threaten it all.

My job makes me basically a saint to [the voter].

Cunningham’s recurrent meditations on faith throughout Great Expectations are interesting on their own, but what they succeed in is driving home the awkwardness of the assumption of campaign staffer as apostle and of candidate as god-king. This notion, clustered together with the reader’s knowing contemporary anxiety (we know the fallacy of looming saviors as well as the danger of grand demagogues), pushes us through the novel just as the campaign rushes forward, fueled by optimistic promises for what the campaign will mean for tomorrow’s America.

It felt good to see Camelot in a guy who wasn’t white. Maybe there was the hope that black, that portentous designation, could finally be subsumed into the mainstream in the way that Kennedy had helped Irish to be. That some long passage of travel was almost done. … Help assimilation—the good kind; call it a final stage of integration—along.

It’s easy to look back on this political era with today’s gaze, even in fiction, and go: that imagination of a post-racial America was closer to willful ignorance than anything else. Cunningham carefully steeps his characters in the eager buoyancy of the time that he’s characterizing. It’s a setting that is deeply uncomfortable to sit within, and it almost causes us to root against David, newly introduced in such close proximity to the elite “haves and the have-mores” who attend private fundraisers in Los Angeles or on Martha’s Vineyard like sugared children alit at the spectacle of a big top circus show.

I learned fairly early on how to ask for money while seeming to flatter the person I was asking. I had always liked following. I got no special thrill from making decisions or issuing orders or choosing sides. I could understand many ways of thinking without committing to anything in particular.

We want to see a reckoning—like the years-long ricochet that we’ve endured in the years following the era that Cunninghman colors, confronting tiki torch Klan marches in Virginia and vigilante murder in Wisconsin, all framed by cream suit controversies and hiccup kneeling demonstrations in the halls of Congress. We’ve seen the grand pageant and we know summation to come.

And it comes. It comes, but only after we stare into the mirror that Cunningham props before us—seeing altogether the celebrity and the masses, the excess and the lack, the hope and the cynicism, the pride and the retribution. Do we recognize our reflection?

Great Expectations is a timely meditation on the gilded spectacle and the promised hangover to follow—panem et circenses indeed.