Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham
Plus, What I'm Reading Now, & What's Next
Told in the dispassionate, somewhat removed but admirable tone of a staffer named David on the campaign trail for the suave, charming, intelligently elegant first Black president, Great Expectations is a quiet, unsuspecting novel full of insightful and sharp sentences.
The narrative arc is no surprise to anybody, or it shouldn’t be, but this is not meant to be a thriller, and there are no real true villains, antagonists or tensions in this world. The core of Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel seems to be about the sacrifices we make when we place too much hope or expectation on any one human being. In this way, Great Expectations both humanizes Barack Obama and the people who touch his orbit and interrogates the humans beneath the stories we tell about them.
I will also say that as someone who worked as an appointee during the Obama years, I was particularly intrigued by the premise of this book and the ideas that it might contain because before I worked in the government — starting in 2014, for the Office of Minority Health, then moving to the Department of Energy in 2015 until the end of the Obama Administration — I was not what I would call a political person. A decade-long journalism career in newspapers kept me on the fringes of any overt or discoverable political bias. To the point that I have the distinction of being one of the only Black women I know who has attended more than one Tea Party rally in Austin, Texas, armed with only a reporter’s notebook and a valiant but exhausting attempt at an open mind. I did not understand what it meant to fundraise and support a candidate through the sweat equity of a campaign. I only learned in passing of alliances, marriages, life-long friendships forged in the harried pursuit of getting the candidate you believed most in to the White House.
Great Expectations demystified the daily grind on the path to victory, even if I am not sure I knew what to expect from the novel as I read it. Cunningham is a staff writer for the New Yorker, to which I was once a devoted, long-time subscriber, even as I moved all the time. (Eventually, I had to acknowledge that I just did not have the time or attention span to keep up with what felt like the weekly pressure of reading the magazine from cover to cover.) One of the remarkable features of his nonfiction is the clarity of the feelings he means to convey through description, so it is not surprising that his descriptions of Barack feel accurate and memorable. There are moments of financial collapse and misdeeds that shifted my focus away from those beautiful descriptions, but it was still an entertaining and valuable read.
The Bay Area Book Festival is this weekend!
In another life, back in the MySpace days (!) I was a newspaper reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, which prompted a decade-long career as an ink-stained wretch, or something like that. Highlights of that life included profiling some of my favorite writers, including Danyel Smith, Alice Walker, Aya De Leon and Octavia Butler. I agree with the late, great, B.I.G. that Cali is a great place to visit, for me, and I’m excited I get to go back and speak on the panel below this weekend. The full line-up is here.
What I’m Reading & Listening To Now
I am very much in love with There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib. The Knicks kept breaking my heart in the 90s, because I don’t have the loyalty of say, Spike Lee, or most New Yorkers I guess (and I’m glad, after these last playoffs, that I made that decision). But I also have always had a love-hate relationship with basketball as a tall Black woman who is really very very bad at basketball. So There’s Always This Year reconnected me to the grace and symbolism that attracted me to the sport in the Jordan and LeBron eras. You can tell Hanif is a poet, and I’ve highlighted a dozen or more passages on my Kindle. Highly recommend.
It’s been soothing my nerves to listen to this collection of meditations and prayers edited by Sarah Bessey, A Rhythm of Prayer. Speaking of Sarah Bessey, her recent post on Gaza resonated with me.
I have also been thinking about this interview of Brittney Griner by J Wortham in the New York Times (Gift Link) trying to figure out if I have the fortitude, if that’s even the right word, to read Griner’s new memoir, Coming Home. Not now. Maybe someday.
New Releases I’m Excited For
Swift River by Essie Chambers, out next Tuesday, June 4th, is going to be beautiful, I can tell from the opening pages.
Kara Walker and Jamaica Kincaid collaborated on a book about gardening!