The Candidate As Background

As a young man Vinson Cunningham worked for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, after which he became a White House staffer. He now teaches in the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

Cunningham’s debut novel provides a first-person narrative from David Hammond. Cunningham is working on the 2008 campaign of “The Candidate”, a young black Senator from Illinois. The name of “The Candidate” (sometimes also referred to as “The Senator”) is never given in the book. Which, I think, is because this is a fictional account, and Barack Obama and his campaign are only the background for this novel. The focus is all on young David.

Great Expectations follows David in his campaign role. He raises funds in New York, he assists the campaign in New Hampshire. He works a campaign event in Los Angeles, then returns to the East Coast. Finally, he is in Chicago for the events of Election Night.

David is a somewhat rudderless twenty-something. He had his first relationship in college which resulted in a baby girl. His baby’s mother was more of a sexual adventure than a girlfriend, and after she became pregnant the two of them agreed they didn’t really like each other. While he strives to remain a presence in his daughter’s life, he has no ongoing relationship with her mother.

The fact of the pregnancy put an end to David’s college career, and he returned to his hometown of New York where he tries to figure out what to do next. As the book opens we find David already at work on the 2008 presidential campaign. His role there came as a result of his friendship with Beverly. She is an older woman working her way up in the finance world whose connections got David the job.

There are office romances, drinking, money begs, and glimpses of the candidate himself that form the bones of the book. But much of the meat lies in the many asides and stories that David shares.

It’s through these stories that we learn about David’s daughter. We hear about his divorced parents. We're learn of his religious upbringing and how important religion remains to him. And much more. It’s clear that David is a thoughtful and introspective young man.

But while the stories are at first interesting and provide background on David’s character, they don’t build on each other. They provide context but not plot. They build character but don’t transcend to provide meaning. At least they didn’t for me. And that’s a problem, as a large part of the book is spent in these stories. As a result, the book had a hard time holding my attention.

I do have to say that I found Cunningham to be a gifted writer whose writing style I enjoyed reading. Each of the individual asides was well constructed, and Cunningham’s attention to detail and to creating a mood were excellent. And that same attention to detail and ability to elicit a mood carries into the scenes of the campaign in the book as well.

Ultimately though, I felt let down by the book. As a reader, a “coming of age” book set during the Obama campaign and called Great Expectations set me up to expect MEANING. Even the late-in-the-book revelation that gives a reason for where the title came from didn’t bring things together for me. Nor did it make up for the meandering path through this novel.

I know that others will have a different impression of this book than I did. I suspect I’m not the reader this book is trying to engage. I expected something like Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, the punchy 1980s book about a young man moving through his own twenty-something changes, and a book that really spoke to me.

But McInerney was a young man himself when he wrote that book, and I was a young man in my twenties when I read it. In Great Expectations Cunningham is looking back at his twenties from a 15 year remove, while I am forty years removed from my own twenties. For that, or whatever reason, I felt myself at an emotional remove from David’s story.

RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐

RATING COMMENTS: A coming of age novel of a young black man working on an historic presidential campaign in 2008. Filled with well-constructed vignettes told against the backdrop of the campaign, the book ultimately let me down as the stories did not build on each other nor yield any deeper meaning.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I received an copy of the book through NetGalley courtesy of the publisher Random House.