Recent Reading Great Expectations

Those of us who take fiction seriously live in the long shadow of Toni Morrison. In the last ten years, there have been many great books written by black writers about the black experience. In my opinion, and others are free to disagree, three of the best books in this category written in the last ten years are Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, and Vinson Cunningham’s recently published Great Expectations.

Cunningham’s book is about a young man in his early twenties who finds a job as a low level staffer for the Obama campaign. Obama is never mentioned by name; instead, Cunningham refers to him as the senator or the candidate. However, this is not a book about Obama or about the campaign; there are other great books available on those topics. Rather, Great Expectations is a Bildungsroman or coming of age novel, in the same way that the Charles Dickens book with the same title is.

There are four reasons I enjoyed Cunningham’s book:

1. On a sentence by sentence level, the language is well crafted.
2. Like Marilyn Robinson, Cunningham takes religion, specifically the black experience of Protestant Christianity as an important factor in the life and development of the protagonist.
3. The book has something to add to the conversation about what it means to be black in America in the early twenty first century.
4. Finally, Cunningham has written a novel about a person who is shaped by books and ideas (despite dropping out of college). Throughout Great Expectations, there are references to Henry James, Walt Whitman, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, Toni Morrison, and Saul Bellow. More than anything else, at least in my opinion, this novel is a book about the moral and intellectual development of character.