At some point in Vinson Cunningham’s autobiographical novel “Great Expectations,” the protagonist David Hammond recalls advice from “a compendium of quasi-mystical approaches to acting.” Any aspiring thespian should lie awake each night and summon a multi-sensory review of her day: the feel of “shower water hitting her back,” the “temperature of the air on her face.” A commitment to this process, according to the book, would amass a vast memory bank from which the actor could draw to play her character more authentically.
Though a staple of method acting, this technique is deftly applied in “Great Expectations” — a fictional account of Cunningham’s experiences as a staffer on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. The calves of the young woman who leads David through the office on his first day of work are “ovals of hot, bright red.” A room in a music producer’s apartment, where a fund-raising reception is held, “smelled like lotion and subtle cologne.” At yet another fund-raising event, this time hosted by a publisher, the walls of a “half-octagonal living room were slick with condensation.”
Readers may, admittedly, feel some apprehension when starting to read such a minutely observed novel: This high-definition simulacrum — with its close inspection of calf muscles, dew, and faint odors — could end up being dull, a worry concomitant with a sense of impatience, especially while reading a novel that incites expectations of an insider-y (albeit fictional) tell-all of the first Black president’s rise to power.
Fortunately, this restlessness is soon allayed by the quality of Cunningham’s writing. The vivid attention to detail in “Great Expectations” creates a singular, and sobering, mood — an ambient rumination on the recent, and seemingly very distant, past.
Meticulous attention is also a function of David’s character. As he mentions in an aside, while noticing the “startlingly well-maintained cuticles” of some men hobnobbing at the music producer’s event: “I watched them closely, looking for a way to be.”
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In his early 20s and on a break from college compelled by paternity, David is on the threshold of adulthood, at a time when life ahead is a cornucopia of possibility. Having stumbled Pip-like into the well-heeled, high-status circle of donors to the “candidate’s” campaign, David has options that expand exponentially. Some older members of this class tend to remind him of this, gently urging him toward law school or “finance” whenever his nascent aspirations to become a writer are broached.
In an attempt to resolve any youthful uncertainty about his path, David looks fixedly upon life as one would a painting, the meaning of which, he expects, will surely reveal itself through his focused power of attention.
He develops this skill when training his gaze on the “candidate,” whose “height was helped by an incredibly erect posture that looked almost practiced, the kind of talismanic maneuver meant to send forth subliminal messages about confidence and power.” David studies the candidate as he addresses a crowd, noting his “royally high” chin, or “how the heel of his left foot left the ground when he stood still.” Like the propman for a play, David watches from offstage as, with his rehearsed speech and movements, the candidate captivates his audience.
David not only views politics as a function of performance, but just about all other aspects of work and life as well. (Cunningham is a theater critic for The New Yorker.) Soon after his enlistment as a campaign staffer, David discovers that mixing among this affluent milieu — and, perhaps, entering adulthood in itself — is a crash course in impression management.
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The candidate, of course, epitomizes this lesson, having crystallized into a walking, talking symbol — or, at least, he has from David’s perspective. Everyone else seems to have been taken in completely. David notes that the donors “treat [the candidate] like a sign, like something whose outward image was intrinsic to his identity.”
Indeed, with other characters, David can both see their masks and peer behind them, as he does when he watches his manager try to dissuade a would-be volunteer with “nice-nasty sunniness,” or his mentor, Beverly, drop her composure at an event to shoot him a “mocking and suggestive” smile. The candidate, however, becomes synonymous with his “intimate seeming” addresses and “gestures whose naturalism [David had] watched him hone for months.”
While it is clear to David what the candidate is supposed to represent to others — that now seemingly quaint “hope” for “change” — he finds it challenging to decipher what, exactly, the candidate is supposed to mean to him, his talent for intense scrutiny notwithstanding. Like a piece by his namesake, David Hammons — the conceptual artist who deploys symbolism associated with African American culture in his work — the candidate invites lazy interpretation while eluding the deeper understanding of those who try to see beyond the surface. For David, the candidate seems to defy the old literary adage that action reveals character, as well as his belief that very close observation will surely betray “truth.”
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Close looking is not David’s only venue in his search for meaning. He regularly recounts his recent past as a devout Christian and his experiences in the church, and is well aware of the grand performances in that arena: the dramatic oratory, the call and response, the speaking in tongues, the occasional fainting. But, as he returns to these episodic memories throughout the novel, he seems to regard these performances as an indicator of something real, a contrast to the strategic personas he regularly encounters in the fund-raising realm.
Although David is of the age to regard his erstwhile faith with ambivalence, he is not yet willing to let it go completely. That period seems to represent a phase of his life when actually believing in something was more important than simply appearing to. What remains unwavering is David’s faith in authenticity, and the novel ultimately explores whether he will retain it.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
By Vinson Cunningham
Hogarth, 254 pp., $28
Hawa Allan writes cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry. She is the author of “Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship.”