Great Expectations

October 1, 2023

There's plenty of idealism in the speech given by the senator from Illinois, and David wonders if such idealism can be sustained in the face of inevitable political compromise. Still, he throws himself into the 18-month campaign to elect the first Black U.S. president, even as he reflects on race, religion, art, and fatherhood. New Yorker staffer Cunningham's debut. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from January 1, 2024
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 Andr� 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.

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Starred review from February 12, 2024
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.

Starred review from February 1, 2024
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.

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