In “Great Expectations,” Vinson Cunningham Watches Barack Obama’s Rise Up Close
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A young man, a little bit adrift, looking for a job and a sense of purpose, finds his way to working on a presidential campaign. That's the opening of a new novel by Vincent Cunningham, who's a staff writer at The New Yorker.

The candidate at the center of the story is a long shot, a young, black, first-term senator from the state of Illinois. I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States of America. Now, you'll surmise that the character is Barack Obama in everything but name.

The narrator of the story, the young campaign worker, is named David. And though this is a novel we're talking about, David's experiences on the Obama campaign are closely based on Vincent Cunningham's own life in the years before he became a journalist.

Vincent, I haven't enjoyed a novel this much in a long time, and I want to start with the very beginning. The novel begins with an incredibly ballsy choice, you call it. Great expectations. Great expectations. Why not? Well, yeah. What is so ballsy about it is the utter originality. You know, it's just like, what is a title that no one else has ever had? It took me so long to figure out. Of a coming-of-age novel. That's right. Well, I can tell you that...

our colleague, our beloved colleague, Emily Nussbaum, at a party, sort of just said it out of nowhere. She was like, you know what would be great if a novel like that could be called Great Expectations? And I was like, I laughed really hard at that. And then the next day, I was like...

It sank in. It's possible that I have to do this. I still laugh every time I tell someone the name of the book. I just wait for the changes in their face. It's great. It's great. Well, let's sketch out the story of Vincent Cunningham. I first heard of you reading you as a freelance writer. I remember reading a piece that you wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates, and you wrote a couple of other pieces, and I said, who is this guy? Yeah. Just the name suddenly appeared, but obviously nobody suddenly appears. Yeah.

Tell me a little bit about your background as a writer. Sure. Um...

I did, when I was in my early 20s, work for the Obama campaign. I was a fundraiser, a very low-level fundraiser. This is right out of school. Pretty much around that age, 22, for reasons that we can go into later. I wasn't out of school yet, but I knew even then that I wanted to write. After the campaign, I worked in the White House. I came back home to New York after that, thinking that I would—

What did you do for the Obama campaign? I was a staff assistant in the New York sort of tri-state fundraising apparatus. So, you know, I was calling people, asking for checks. I was, you know, a lot of fundraising on political campaigns then and now happens at fundraising events. You know, you go to some rich person's apartment and

And they invite their friends at, you know, $2,300 was the limit back then, back when we had campaign finance laws. And people come and go to these events. So I would be, you know, at the front collecting checks and writing down names or things like that. I was the lowest level person in that. So this is 2007? 2007 through 2008. So I joined that campaign in March of...

of 2007, which was only a month after he announced his bid for the presidency. How did you encounter Obama and what gave you, for want of a better phrase, great expectations about him? Well, it's so funny. I, like many of us,

first heard about Obama, first knew about him in 2004 when he gave that speech at Kerry's convention in Boston. There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America. There's the United States of America.

And like everybody else, kind of perked up, interesting guy. Speaks in what sound like paragraphs. Has an interesting comportment. Very good posture, that guy. Incredible posture. Lastingly good posture. Enviable posture. I am a writer, and I have this very slight hunch. He has none of that. But anyway, I, just like the character in this book, stumbled onto that campaign. I was...

kind of freshly flunked out of school. I was tutoring a kid in English, and someone connected to him knew Obama from back in the Chicago days. You were finding your way. I was finding my way. You were becoming somebody. That's right. That's right. And as has often happened to me in my life, something swept me into a place that I couldn't have imagined.

And at a certain point, you become a freelance writer. You come and start writing at The New Yorker. You write long nonfiction pieces. You're a theater critic. But at a certain point, fiction itches at you to do this. When was that, and how did you decide, this is the story? I want to tell essentially my story in this form. Yeah, I wanted to write this book and started to try to write it before I...

ever walked through these halls into one of these rooms that we're sitting in now. I started writing a version of this story back in 2013 and quickly realized, well, not as quickly as I would have liked, but that I was kind of on the wrong path. But there was one page that

that I decided, you know, I had like 100 pages. I'm like, okay, I'm going to finish this novel. And I realized this is not it. But there was one page of the title character, the main character, standing in the middle of the swirl of a party looking at a painting, reading it almost for clues and sort of relating it to different moments in his own life. And I knew, okay, this sounds...

like me. And at this point, it's like a year into my working at The New Yorker that I was like, okay, this page, I'm going to work from here. Vincent, one thing that's present in the novel and very present in the novel is religion. And I would guess, I'm just taking a wild guess here, that in both the Obama campaign as you experienced it and the world that you now are in,

that people of faith are not that common, whereas in other realms of the country, it is. Tell me about your religious background and how it informed this novel. Yeah, it informed it in lots of different ways. As you know, I grew up in the church. My mother is a Bible study teacher, preacher, my Sunday school teacher, pastor.

the person who taught me to read and also to read the Bible. My father was a church musician. All of this informs, first of all, the way I read. You mentioned all these digressions, David walking around, looking at things as if searching for signs. The way that I was taught to read was highly symbolic and

and exegetical. I was taught to read by reading the King James Bible. The way that I was taught to suss out symbols was through establishing correspondences between the Old and New Testaments, things like this. So that's who I am as a reader, first of all. But second of all, and I think this is part of the outlook of David Hammond in this novel, it's trying to establish a real basis for belief.

You know, this is what we do and certainly did with Obama when it comes to politics. We hang our faith on objects, on people, based on the signs that they put out, you know? And that's certainly been a factor in my own life, this rapid and urgent search for patterns and the way that we did this with Obama. You know, I remember there was this quote by RFK from 68 where he said,

where he said, you know, I think in another 40 years, America will be ready to elect a black president. He said it to James Baldwin. He said this. To James Baldwin's outrage. Was that in the famous meeting at the, in the apartment at the UN? Yes. Baldwin is outraged. He says, we've been here long before the Irish came into the United States. How can you tell me? And you're condescendingly telling me that we'll have a president in 40 years. Baldwin was outraged by that. That's right. But it was 40 years after he said that, and here was Obama. And that's the kind of thing that we assigned Obama

biblical importance to in that time. I don't think people remember how much people, you know, would make these correspondences and point to moments in American history and talk about Obama as if he was the fulfillment of a whole symbol structure.

Not just a sort of messianic thing, but the answer to so many questions across history that I could only relate to my religious education. And that's part of the reason why those things are so closely entwined in this novel. And it's part of the way that David reads situation. I'm talking with staff writer Vincent Cunningham, whose new novel is called Great Expectations. We'll continue in a moment. It's Madeline Barron from In the Dark.

I've spent the past four years investigating a crime. When you're driving down this road, I plan on killing somebody. A four-year investigation, hundreds of interviews, thousands of documents, all in an effort to see what the U.S. military has kept from the public for years. Did you think that a war crime had been committed? I don't have any opinion on that. Season three of In the Dark is available now, wherever you get your podcasts.

So you call the Obama figure in the novel, the senator, the candidate. There's no one who reads this who's going to mistake it for anybody else. Absolutely. And the main character says that seeing this powerful black man, his posture, how he holds himself, how he speaks, holds up a mirror to him. That's true. Did Obama do that to you?

Of course. I think he did that, you know, I think he did it to everybody. And that was some of the magic of it. This sort of utter transferability of his qualities, this item onto which so many of us, and I hate to, I don't mean to dehumanize him, but this is the exact effect though, that I think it was conscious on his part, that

acting as an item onto which people would project not only fantasy but personal qualities, you know? And he knew it. And he knew it. And he knew it so well. And it's funny. I was talking about this the other day. You know how most other presidents you can reduce to like a thousand points of light, you know, whatever the thing is.

As Obama moves on past his presidency, it almost seems like he's less legible. He doesn't reduce to a single line or symbol or sign. And I think it's because, for better or worse, he was so good at this, at being everything. Did he ever disappoint you? Yeah, sure. Because of proximity or because of politics? Because of—I will admit that it has been dispiriting.

to see him making movies and being on jet skis as the world burns. It seems like, you know, maybe his fatal flaw is also the great strength that we were talking about, which is usually the great strength of a movie star. How do you mean? To manage his own meaning and to court a certain...

because of his personal qualities. And that's not the same, let's say, virtue of Jimmy Carter, who just projected, and I think we can now say lived, a desire to be good. Capital B, capital G. It's something else. And I think he has managed his life since his presidency more like a movie star than someone who's great at

hope was to change the world or something like that. Right now, we're engaged in a presidential race. It seems almost 90% sure that, assuming everybody lives, that the presidential race will be between two old white guys. That's right. One who is a Republican and arguably an authoritarian, and

And another who's a hard-time stand-up comedian. And that and many other things. And Joe Biden. Right. Who's arguably, depending on what your politics are, a good and competent president. You can have whatever arguments you want to have with him. But who reads to even more people than Trump does as old. And that seems to be his main deficiency. Yeah.

Against that background, and it's very close, it's essentially a tie with maybe Trump having at this moment a slightly better chance. What role would you like to see Obama play in that? Well, I think that he will play the role that I hope he plays, which is to be... He'll campaign at the end of the barstorm. But is there anything more he can do? I don't know. But I do wonder if he could... I think part of me wondered what...

role Obama could play in helping the Democratic Party in a moment of emergency over the next six months or so. Yeah, but I'll tell you who ain't going to emerge is Michelle Obama. I've never met anybody who would less want to be a politician in this world. Oh, gosh.

Yeah, no, I don't. That's a fantasy. I don't think that's going to happen. I have never had the passion for politics. I just happened to be married to somebody who has the passion for politics. And he drug me kicking and screaming into this arena. Yeah. This has, you know, so just because I gave a good speech and I'm smart and intelligent doesn't mean that I should be the next president. That's not how we should pick the president. Right.

Another thing that he failed to do when president, which was build a bridge to someone else. You know, the decimation of the Democratic Party institutionally over his tenure is indisputable. And so I would hope that he would be doing something like that. If not, you know, whatever, convincing someone to retire or whatever. Building a bridge and pointing toward a future and making—

A reiteration of the case that Joe Biden, because remember, Joe Biden promised to be that bridge, implicitly promising to be a one-term president, whatever. OK. Did he implicitly promise or did we glom that on? Hope that that's what he meant. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But I think that maybe Obama's line could be, we're going to do this one more time.

And here's what the Democratic Party is about going forward. I mean, you know I'm better than maybe any journalist. I don't know. What do you think he will do? I think he'll barnstorm as best he can. I think he's very self-conscious of not having his still existing rigor be contrasted negatively to Joe Biden's 81-year-oldness. That's a problem, too.

Maybe it's, you may see it as convenient for Obama. I think he worries about that. Just to go back to the fictional part. Sure. One of the great virtues and resonances of the title is that the novel ends with Obama's victory. That's right. In, I think it's Grant Park. Grant Park. Where the celebration was, where I was. I was there too. Amazing. Amazing night.

And it leads you to the title Great Expectations. And people had all kinds of expectations. That's right. Particularly about race and the future of the republic. I don't want to get too grand in the political sense about the novel. But I think we're led to wonder about that as things end. Yeah. I think the effect of – by the way, I –

As the timeline that I mentioned to you implies, I wrote this book all the way through the Trump era, which could not be more opposite to that in –

affect and tone. How did that affect things? Well, it made me wonder, if anything, you know, I think the novel, part of its function is to operate as a history of feeling. You know, one of my other favorite novels is Sentimental Education, with Flaubert. You know, as the French Revolutions are happening, this young man kind of

flop-sweating through his life of manners, but this great political happening of the backdrop, right? It made me think that it was perhaps the last time in my lifetime that any thinking person would put this much weight, symbolic or otherwise, on the electoral exercise of electing a president. I just can't... Can you imagine all of us who want Joe Biden to defeat Trump, can you imagine anybody coming out talking about

Joe Biden in terms as rhapsodic and hopeful as we once did with Obama. It's never going to happen again. The day that I sent this novel out to publishers hoping that they would take it, everybody will know what day it was. I sent the novel out. My agent was like, the emails are out. Great. I sat down on the couch to watch the 2020 election be certified. It was January 6, 2021. Wow. Wow.

The day I sent out this novel, I sit down and I watch people scaling the walls of Congress. And it was a way of, symbolically to me, it said, yeah, chapter closed. That is never happening again. Wow. Yeah. Vincent Cunningham, thank you. Thank you. That's Vincent Cunningham, New Yorker staff writer and co-host of our podcast, Critics at Large.

Vincent's debut novel is called Great Expectations. Don't order the wrong one by mistake. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for listening to the show this week, and I hope you'll join us next time. That was great. Thank you. That was such an honor. This is so good. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

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