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 Vinson 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.

Barrack Obama: I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America.

[applause]

David Remnick: 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. Though this is a novel we're talking about, David's experiences on the Obama campaign are closely based on Vinson Cunningham's own life in the years before he became a journalist. Vinson, 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?

Vinson Cunningham: Great Expectations.

David Remnick: Great Expectations. Why not?

Vinson Cunningham: Well, yes. What is so ballsy about it is the utter originality. Just like what is a title that no one else has ever had? It took me so long to figure out.

David Remnick: Of a coming-of-age novel.

Vinson Cunningham: That's right. Well, I can tell you that our colleague, our beloved colleague, Emily Nussbaum, at a party, just said it out of nowhere. She's like, "You know what, it would be great if a novel like that could be called Great Expectations." I laughed really hard at that, and the next day, I was like, "Man, 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.

David Remnick: Well, let's sketch out the story of Vinson 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?" Just the name suddenly appeared, but obviously, nobody suddenly appears. Tell me a little bit about your background as a writer.

Vinson Cunningham: Sure. I did, when I was in my early 20s, work for the Obama campaign. I was a fundraiser, a very low-level fundraiser.

David Remnick: This is right out of school.

Vinson Cunningham: 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 eventually write.

David Remnick: What did you do for the Obama campaign?

Vinson Cunningham: I was a staff assistant in the New York tri-state fundraising apparatus. I was calling people, asking for checks. A lot of fundraising on political campaigns then and now happens at fundraising events. You go to some rich person's apartment and they invite their friends. $2,300 was the limit back then, back when we had campaign finance laws, and people come and go to these events. I would be at the front collecting checks and writing down names or things like that. I was the lowest level person in that.

David Remnick: This is 2007.

Vinson Cunningham: 2007 through 2008. I joined that campaign in March of 2007 which is only a month after he announced his bid for the presidency.

David Remnick: How did you encounter Obama and what gave you, for want of a better phrase, great expectations about him?

Vinson Cunningham: What'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.

Barrack Obama: There is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America.

[applause]

Barrack Obama: There is not a Black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America, there's the United States of America.

Vinson Cunningham: Like everybody else kind of perked up, interesting guy, speaks in what sounds like paragraphs, has an interesting comportment. Very good posture that guy.

David Remnick: Incredible posture.

Vinson Cunningham: Lastingly good posture.

David Remnick: Enviable posture.

Vinson Cunningham: I am a writer and I have this very slight hunch. He has none of that. Anyway, I, just like the character in this book, stumbled onto that campaign. I was 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.

David Remnick: You were finding your way.

Vinson Cunningham: I was finding my way.

David Remnick: You were becoming somebody.

Vinson Cunningham: That's right. As it has often happened to me in my life, something swept me into a place that I couldn't have imagined.

David Remnick: At a certain point, you become a freelance writer. You come and start writing at The New Yorker. You write long non-fiction pieces, 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"?

Vinson Cunningham: I wanted to write this book and started to try to write it before I ever walked through these halls and 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 on the wrong path. There was one page that I decided-- I had a hundred pages, and I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to finish this novel."

I realized this is not it, but there was one page of the main character, standing in the middle of the swirl of a party, looking at a painting, reading it almost for clues and relating it to different moments in his own life. I knew this sounds like me. At this point, it's like a year into my working at The New Yorker that I was like, "This page, I'm going to work from here."

David Remnick: Vinson, one thing that's present in the novel and very present in the novel is religion. 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.

Vinson Cunningham: It informed it in lots of different ways. As you know, I grew up in the church. My mother was a Bible study teacher, preacher, my Sunday school teacher, 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 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. That's who I am as a reader, first of all. 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.

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. 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. I remember there was this quote by RFK from '68 where he said, "I think in another 40 years, America will be ready to elect a Black president."

David Remnick: He said to James Baldwin.

Vinson Cunningham: He said this.

David Remnick: James Baldwin was outraged.

Vinson Cunningham: Was that in the famous meeting at the apartment at the [unintelligible 00:08:24]?

David Remnick: Yes. Baldwin was outraged. He said, "We've been here long before [crosstalk]"-

Vinson Cunningham: 400 years. [laughs]

David Remnick: -"United States."

Vinson Cunningham: "How can you tell me?"

David Remnick: "And you're condescendingly telling me that we'll have a president in 40 years?" Baldwin was outraged for that.

Vinson Cunningham: That's right, but it was 40 years after he said that, and here was Obama. That's the kind of thing that we assigned Biblical importance to in that time. I don't think people remember how much people 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 messianic thing, but the answer to so many questions across history that I could only relate to my religious education.

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 situations.

David Remnick: 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-

Vinson Cunningham: Absolutely, yes.

David Remnick: -as I can see. 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.

Vinson Cunningham: That's true.

David Remnick: Did Obama do that to you?

Vinson Cunningham: Of course. I think he did that.

David Remnick: To everybody.

Vinson Cunningham: I think he did it to everybody. That was some of the magic of it. This utter transferability of his qualities, this item onto which so many of us, and I don't mean to dehumanize him, but this is the exact effect, though, that I think it was conscious on his part acting as an item onto which people would project, not only fantasy, but personal qualities.

David Remnick: He knew it.

Vinson Cunningham: He knew it and he knew it so well. 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, whatever the thing is? As Obama moves on past his presidency, it almost seems like he's less legible, unlike other presidents. 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.

David Remnick: Did he ever disappoint you?

Vinson Cunningham: Yes, sure. I think--

David Remnick: Because of proximity or because of politics?

Vinson Cunningham: I will admit that it has been dispiriting to see him making movies and being on jet skis as the world burns. Maybe his fatal flaw is also the great strength that we're talking about, which is usually the great strength of a movie star.

David Remnick: How do you mean?

Vinson Cunningham: To manage his own meaning and to court a certain glamor 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. I think he has managed his life since his presidency more like a movie star than like someone whose great hope was to change the world or something like that.

David Remnick: 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.

Vinson Cunningham: That's right.

David Remnick: One who is a Republican and arguably an authoritarian and another who's [crosstalk]--

Vinson Cunningham: At times a stand-up comedian.

David Remnick: That and many other things, and Joe Biden, 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. That seems to be his main deficiency. 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?

Vinson Cunningham: Well, I think that he will play the role that I hope he plays, which is to be--

David Remnick: He'll campaign at the end of the barnstorm, but is there anything more he can do?

Vinson Cunningham: I don't know, but 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.

David Remnick: [crosstalk] [unintelligible 00:13:27] is Michelle Obama. I've never met anybody who would less want to be a politician in this world. That's a fantasy.

Vinson Cunningham: Yes, I know. I don't think that's going to happen.

Michelle Obama: I have never had the passion for politics, I just happened to be married to somebody who has the passion for politics, and he dragged me, kicking and screaming, into this arena. 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.

Vinson Cunningham: Another thing that he failed to do when president was build a bridge to someone else. The decimation of the Democratic Party institutionally over his tenure is indisputable. I would hope that he would be doing something like that, if not, 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.

David Remnick: Did he implicitly promise or did we glom that [crosstalk]--

Vinson Cunningham: That that's what he meant?

[laughter]

David Remnick: Yes.

Vinson Cunningham: Maybe. 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." You know him better than maybe any journalist. I don't know. What do you think he will do?

David Remnick: 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. You may see it as convenient for Obama. I think he worries about that. Just to go back to the fictional part here, one of the great virtues and resonances of the title is that the novel ends with Obama's victory.

Vinson Cunningham: That's right.

David Remnick: In, I think it's Grant Park.

Vinson Cunningham: Grant Park.

David Remnick: Where the celebration was, where I was.

Vinson Cunningham: I was there too.

David Remnick: Amazing night. It leads you to the title, Great Expectations, and people had all kinds of expectations.

Vinson Cunningham: That's right.

David Remnick: 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.

Vinson Cunningham: Yes. I think the effect of-- By the way, 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.

David Remnick: How did that affect things?

Vinson Cunningham: Well, it made me wonder-- If anything, I think the novel part of its function is to operate as a history of feeling. One of my other favorite novels is Sentimental Education by Flaubert. As the French revolutions are happening, this young man flop sweating through his life of manners but this great political happening at the backdrop. 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.

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 6th, 2021.

David Remnick: Wow.

Vinson Cunningham: The day I sent out this novel, I sit down and I watch people scaling the walls of Congress. It was symbolic to me. It said, "Chapter closed. That is never happening again."

David Remnick: Wow. Vinson Cunningham, thank you.

Vinson Cunningham: Thank you.

David Remnick: That's Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker staff writer and co-host of our podcast, Critics at Large. Vinson's debut novel is called Great Expectations. Don't order the wrong one by mistake. That was great.

Vinson Cunningham: Thank you. That was such an honor.

David Remnick: This is so good.

[music]

 

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