Vinson Cunningham. Great Expectations. Hogarth, 2024.
IT IS NOT UNUSUAL for a deeply personal novel also to function as a political novel, grounding calls for change in the experiences of the characters. This has been the case for centuries; Charles Dickens veiled his political and social beliefs only thinly in novels like Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit, which also drew on his own childhood. In fact, the idea that there is a parallel between the development of a soul and the development of a state goes as far back as Plato’s Republic, and the urge to understand politics in terms of our own lives is a powerful one.
It is less usual, however, for a novel to invert this schema: to begin as a novel of politics and conclude as a penetrating investigation of an individual soul. In the virtuosic Great Expectations, Vinson Cunningham succeeds in this inversion that even Plato did not explicitly make (though one might argue that The Republic is a bit more of a bildungsroman than it appears). Through a novel as lyrical as a hymn, Cunningham explores the various natures of our many myths—from political to social to racial to religious—and reminds us that it is in the individual soul, not on the stump or campaign stage, that we must work out which symbols are merely tokens to be used and abused and which are signs of life. Great Expectations is far more than a novel of politics, or even a novel of history or race or society. It is, subtly and surprisingly, a novel of religion—not of spirituality, but of religion: the repeated motions performed by a community that express a shared conviction about how we ought to live as composites of the fixed and the fleeting.
It would be easy but inaccurate to call Great Expectations autofiction, though there are plenty of parallels between Cunningham’s own life and the key events of the novel. Great Expectations follows its narrator, a young Black man named David Hammond, through the presidential campaign of a Black political figure identified only as “the candidate.” Cunningham worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and stayed on to work in the Obama White House. Like Cunningham’s, David’s childhood straddles New York and Chicago. Both of their fathers are church musicians, and both exist in an ecumenical no-man’s-land: baptized Catholics who attended Jesuit schools alongside traditional Black Protestant churches.
For the melancholic, dreamy David, this blended heritage—of cities, religious traditions, and eventually cultures and political values—often feels like a mire, making decisive action difficult. David is rarely caught up in his passions; rather, he maintains a distance (not exactly a critical one, more an observative one) from the events unfolding around him, in part because of his upbringing as a child of many worlds.
The plot follows the arc of the candidate’s run for office, but it is interspersed with David’s extended musings on music, art, photography, and basketball, as well as his relationship, or lack thereof, with his young illegitimate daughter. These two main threads—the election and David’s attempts to understand his identity as a father—proceed in parallel, kept carefully apart in David’s life. They only intersect in Cunningham’s delicate handling.
Cunningham’s own life seems to have a clearer direction than David’s. Even as a young writer, he was obviously one to watch; after working in the Obama White House, he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in the apocalyptic year of 2016, where he continues to write literary and theater criticism. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (for criticism) in 2024, the same year his debut novel, Great Expectations, was published and became a national bestseller.
Cunningham has political chops, but Great Expectations is no West Wing–esque political drama. Its focus is less on the thrill of campaigning—and victory—than on the accumulation of myths, memories, and moments that become a life, both for a person and for a nation. Cunningham draws on the eclectic accumulation of his own life, especially on the curious cheek-by-jowl Catholic and Protestant, political and apolitical, influences.
Just as in Dickens, from whom Cunningham borrows the title, the “great expectations” in question are not met. David, who joins the campaign in a blur of enthusiasm, finds himself somewhat 
baffled by the candidate’s artificiality, his willingness to be reduced to a symbol at the expense of genuine warmth and human relationships. The candidate does, in one sense, live up to the great expectations of the young narrator: He becomes president of the United States. He changes, however subtly, the language used by an entire nation. But the irony of Dickens’s title suffuses the novel; for all the language of change, the campaign—and David’s own participation in it—lie in shadow. David finds himself implicated in campaign finance corruption, and though he seems to escape unscathed, his inside knowledge tarnishes the radiance of the candidate’s triumph.
The book is gorgeously written and elegantly structured. Cunningham’s sentences are lush and moody (“A fuchsia glow reached my window, and so did the fattest leaf of a tall palm, pressed against the glass like the hand of someone desperate for help”), drawing us along through David’s scattered contemplations as he observes up close the candidate’s quest for victory. This particularly beautiful passage epitomizes Cunningham’s style:
My mother tells a story about our first Fourth of July in Chicago. We were on our way home from a party at the home of one of my parents’ new friends—some fellow parishioner or teacher—and, on the road, several people, in tandem, as if choregraphed or urged by a radio signal, reached out of their car windows and started shooting real bullets—substitute fireworks—into the air. She’d thought the Bronx was tough before that. The anecdote sounds like something out of another of Bellow’s books, the one about a dean at a Chicago university who’s written a long lament about the city in one of America’s glossiest, most respected, least read magazines. Then, too, the professor is involved, inanely, in a criminal case following the death of a student at his school—at the hands, he says, of a black pimp and a black prostitute, both infamous in the squalid corners of town. The case and the article get the man—whose name is Corde, and whose cord, I’m sorry to report, is sort of fraying as he sits waiting in Bucharest for the death of his wife’s mother, and for more news about the trial—labeled a kook, which he more or less is. But oh!, to belong enough to a place to get so disillusioned by it. To feel so disappointed, when disappointment—reactionary ardor—comes from love!
This paragraph reads easily and looks easy to put together, but this kind of simple passage from story to story is hard to pull off. The paragraph feels entire. Every detail fits. But the components are, on closer inspection, not intuitively connected; they are not even the same kinds of things. David begins by recalling a strange, firsthand account of random lawlessness, in which the lawlessness has almost a childlike quality. This leads to a scene from a book by Saul Bellow. But rather than emphasizing an obvious connection between the two anecdotes—say, the criminal underbelly of Chicago, or the racially charged ways people talk about that underbelly—David meditates instead on how people become perceived as unreliable narrators. And then he closes with those ecstatic lines worthy of a medieval saint, using two exclamation points in as many sentences.
Cunningham’s prose here has a rich poetic element. The ideas and images do not follow in a rational, argumentative sense, but imaginatively they are clearly related. More than that, Cunningham has mastered the poetic art of the inevitable surprise: The closing of this paragraph is a shock—such intimate, vulnerable, achingly sincere language!—but as we come to know the narrator, David, it is the only way such a reflection could have ended.
This kind of surprising turn, marked by deep and often uncomfortable emotional vulnerability, characterizes the whole book. In another section, David reflects on a fairly straightforward case of political manipulation: After receiving a boost early on during the election from his association with Cornel West, the candidate “stopped returning West’s calls, and when the inauguration came, [West] couldn’t even score a ticket.” This is a common enough tale in politics, but after seeing West proclaim that the candidate’s run “was a rare instance of ‘radical love’ made real,” the candidate’s snub makes young David “slightly depressed.” The section ends with David recalling how, at an early rally, the two men “met in a half embrace and waved at the crowd, their dark suits like shadows against the Apollo’s blood-red curtain.”
There follows a small section break on the page, and then David writes, “I still lived in my old room, at my mother’s, on the Upper West Side—when my daughter was with me, she slept in a small bed in primary colors.”
There is no explicit connection between these two sections. Indeed, the section that opens by mentioning his daughter moves on after a few sentences and never returns to her. But his disappointment with the candidate’s treatment of Cornell West resonates throughout the brief glimpse of his relationship with her. It is as if David cannot bring himself to write about the depression he feels at his failure to become the man he would like to be; seeing characteristics he does not admire in the candidate allows him to indicate, however subtly, those characteristics in himself that he cannot face.
This brings us to the great dichotomy at the heart of the novel. It is not, as we might expect, a dichotomy between Black and white. It is not even a dichotomy between good and evil, or the active and the contemplative, or social and the individual, or any of the other dichotomies we are used to seeing in novels. Rather, it is a dichotomy between the fixed and the fleeting.
The real drama of the novel unfolds in the strange relationship between these two realities. As he observes the campaign, with all its historical and social import, David mulls the immutable reality of the past as compared with the fluidity of the present moment, simultaneously vanishing and full of potential. But he also wrestles with the curious solidifying of the candidate himself, who seems to leave behind his own human fleetingness to become an inflexible symbol.
It may seem as though the fixed is more real and more reliable than the fleeting. But that is not what we find in the novel. Midway through the campaign, David realizes,
Somewhere along the line I’d realized that all of my private language about [the candidate’s] physical bearing was statuary: he could talk, and move, and make his mark felt in time, but his deepest significance to me was as something solid, sure, impossible not to reckon with in space, yet ultimately frozen—something with a plaque affixed, asking to be dutifully studied.
The candidate here has transcended his identity as a mere fleeting human personality; he has become a figure in a myth who can “make his mark felt in time,” just as something hard can make its mark felt in something softer. But he has lost something in this. He has shed that erratic and fleeting contingency that is personality. It is this contingency that causes us all to be subsumed and swept away by history; the candidate has risen above the tide, but in doing so, he has become static, “ultimately frozen.” He has become a topic, a subject of intellectual and scholarly consideration.
The candidate is, in fact, the most consistent and solid thing in the world of Great Expectations. Everything else is shifting, contingent, fleeting. Even America is not solid; when David goes with the campaign to Los Angeles, he wonders “what would happen when I finally saw, no, touched, the Pacific; whether the country would somehow begin to cohere.” It does not. Neither does David’s own personal life. Only the candidate coheres, and that causes him to become something uncomfortable, dreadful, even a little inhuman. “I admired the candidate in a way I hadn’t before, but also, for the same reason—because despite his veneer of rationality he could access a surreal mysticism that I recognized from my childhood, and had never managed, in the end, to like—I started to regard him with a wary fear, too.”
In accessing this mysticism, the candidate takes on the qualities of a religious symbol. He is able, through his words and even his mere presence, to draw others up out of their contingent existence. David recalls, “I left my body behind again when the candidate began to speak.… Belief, among the truly successful and manically aspirant, was odd in that way: it worked best when it swam against the current of reality, not with it.”
At this point, it may sound as though Cunningham had written a simple hagiography of a person he considers a contemporary political saint, a figure to be embraced or cast aside depending on one’s political convictions. That is not what Great Expectations is, because near the end of the novel David recognizes a vital truth: Politics is not a true religion.
When David watches the candidate (“a moving statue, made to stand in a great square and eke out noise”) step onto the stage after securing victory, he finds himself strangely deflated. He writes, “I couldn’t admire the candidate…or even sustain the same jazzy curiosity about him that I’d once nurtured, now that I could interpret the symbols he offered.” In other words, the signs offered by the candidate do not satisfy David.
In all this, I could not help seeing the Eucharist. To describe Great Expectations as a Catholic novel would be misleading, but a distinct Catholicity is certainly present. The more I read and reread the novel, the more convinced I became that there is no understanding its various dichotomies without understanding that most Catholic of things, the body and blood of Christ.
David writes that “in the end…they did treat [the candidate] like a sign, like something whose outward image is intrinsic to its identity.” The outward image here, the thing we can touch, is intrinsic to but not, fundamentally, equivalent to the thing’s deepest self, its quiddity. That definition should sound familiar to anyone who has considered the Eucharist, that greatest of all symbols, in which the bread is indeed intrinsic to the hidden identity of the body.
What we see at work in Great Expectations is a ballet of symbols, signs that point to something beyond themselves, fleeting points in time that promise to anchor us in the fixed arc of history and even eternity. But not all these symbols are equal. The candidate becomes a walking statue; he is a symbol, indeed, but as David studies him more and more closely, he begins to suspect that the candidate is only a symbol. Early in the campaign, he recalls, “I’d been close, or felt close, to figuring out something else: the history and fulfillment of a feeling. I was interested less in the campaign’s plot than in how I was supposed to interpret it. Less in its details than in its coded total meaning.” The campaign and the candidate himself have become mythological; they have become signs that can be used to organize history. They are codes to be cracked, rather than living, breathing realities to be reckoned with.
This anecdote stands in stark contrast to another later in the book, when David recalls a grade-school performance of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, where he plays the minor role of a railroad official who recites just a few lines of a poem. David recalls his frustration with the part; despite its apparent triviality, he finds himself drawn into a quest to understand the railroad official. He longs to portray this strange, fleeting character fully and convincingly. “If I couldn’t be a star,” he says, “I could turn these lines into an act of compression” in which he is able to offer his own life to the audience. “I never figured it out,” he says. Even as David’s keen powers of observation allow him to crack the code of the complex symbol known as the candidate, this simple railroad official—by his very triviality, his very contingency and fleeting nature—eludes him, just like “the veiled God of [his] youth.”
There is a paradox at work here. What appears fixed is seen as fleeting (David’s body, his solidity, is the part of himself that is bound to time and history), and what appears fleeting is shown to be our tie to the transcendent (the breath and emotions and experiences that make up a person’s life).
David, riding on a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard early in the novel, reflects on this paradox. As he skims over the waves, he finds himself thinking about the story of Nicodemus from John’s Gospel, when Christ tells the Pharisee that he must be born again “of water and of the Spirit.” David imagines “a man, alone, at the center of a limitless ocean…treading desperately, howling.” This is life, he imagines; and “the new birth is whatever comes next, a miracle or a death. Salvation, then, wouldn’t be a walk across the water but a memory of the depths.”
Great Expectations surprised me in many ways, but most of all by being a novel of salvation. We are not saved, it says, by transcending our human contingencies—our social status, our race, our sex, our relationships, all the delicate little strands that weave together to make us us. Salvation does not consist of becoming an untouchable and internally consistent symbol to be decoded. Rather, we are saved by our very contingency, by our small and shifting and fleeting nature.
At the very end of the book, David reflects on the candidate’s unreality. “He mattered and didn’t just as my own history mattered and didn’t. Just like the fathers I knew, who were there—they cast huge shadows and never sank—but were also ciphers, names that survived in our minds because of how deftly they evaded stable meaning.” From here, he is suddenly confronted by the truth that he is in grave danger of being just this kind of unreal cipher to his own daughter, a possibility that he desperately wants to avoid. He says, thinking of his daughter, “I knew I wanted to be more than a Rorschach, more legible than a symbol, more vivid and musical.… I wanted to be real in a way history wasn’t.”
So what about the Eucharist, and the mystery of God? Is Christ simply another cipher for interpreting history, the Eucharist just another code that evades stable meaning, attracts us by its apparent wholeness but proves to be stiff and artificial? Cunningham does not spell out an answer. But even as David finds the campaign and the candidate’s victory to be totalizing symbols that do not satisfy, he finds little cracks in the symbols of religion, little chasms through which hints of something else shine through.
Just before the election, David revisits the Catholic parish he attended as a child in Chicago, and there, he says, “I felt myself repelled by politics and disgusted by everyday life, attracted again, too urgently, to the veiled God of my youth, if only because He still spoke words I couldn’t comprehend.” Politics is important. Everyday life is important. Nothing in the novel attempts to undercut the significance of these things or to free us from the consequences of our actions in this life. But that is the quiet triumph of Great Expectations: that politics is not everything, and there remains an unflagging hope that there remain symbols we cannot reduce. The novel reminds us that this one simple rule remains true in politics, history, religion, and individual life: There is no substitute for real flesh and blood.
J.C. Scharl is a poet and playwright. Her poetry has appeared in many outlets, including the BBC, New Ohio Review, Hopkins Review, The Lamp, and many others. Her first verse play, Sonnez Les Matines, debuted in New York City in February 2023 and is available through Wiseblood Books.
Image: Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash
