“I wanted to be real in a way that history wasn’t, and realized, listening to the new president, that I didn’t yet know how, couldn’t fathom where to begin.”
Dramatically and narratively unfocused, "Great Expectations" is a coming-of-age story about a young man's relationship with identity, hope, and responsibility.
“‘You work all year to earn your summer on the Vineyard,’ she told me, smiling, after I’d marveled at the place while getting the tour. Marveling was a skill I’d recently picked up.”
Based on the author's experiences working on the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the book veers between intensely personal musings of the narrator and attempts to ascribe the national zeitgeist in the heady days of Obama's arrival.
“He cocked his head and cocked his palms skyward. We two were feeling the same thing, he seemed to be saying, and whatever it was couldn’t be – didn’t need to be – forced through any process of language.”
Vinson Cunningham weaves commentary on religion, sex, and parenthood into the political undercurrent of time and place, ascribing intense "the political is the personal" vibes to "Great Expectations."
“ … Ethnicity was very much like grace, and very much unlike most other American things: it existed apart from the notion, the mere appearance, of merit. You could belong without a fee.”
The author falls in love with clauses and em dashes, lending an interruptive feel to the reading, and some of the musings tend toward the vacuous. Basically, I wanted to like this one more than I actually did, which is usually the fault of the reader rather than the writer.
Blink and you could miss the denouement, but the book has a prose and pace that distinctly belong to Cunningham, making it an important addition to the literary observations of the Obama Era.
“The people I knew were and weren’t real, in the sense of authenticity. They did what they shouldn’t do without jettisoning the orthodoxies that should’ve made them ashamed.”
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