By Toby Izenberg
Great Expectations, Vinson Cunningham’s 2024 debut novel, appears at first glance to be a memoir loosely disguised as a work of fiction. Cunningham, a staff writer and drama critic for the New Yorker, worked on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008. The story of David Hammond, Great Expectations’s protagonist, closely follows Cunningham’s personal history. But though Great Expectations is a novel centered around a specific political campaign, it holds politics at arm’s length: the Democratic candidate David works for is not Obama, but “the Senator” or “the Candidate,” a heavily symbolic figure who rarely appears physically throughout the text. Despite a central arc culminating in the 2008 election, David’s narration actively resists the presidential campaign’s forward motion, instead delving “downward—down, down, down into the core of things,” into lengthy ruminations on personal values, beliefs, and writerly ambitions (Cunningham 146). In this essay, I argue that Cunningham’s simultaneous evocation and minimization of political specificity acts as an exploration of Obama’s cultural iconization, while at the same time producing the conditions for Great Expectations’ success within the literary field. I also examine the real-life Barack Obama’s annual summer reading list, asserting that it serves as a bid for cultural authority and political objectivity. In the process, I draw on literary-sociological theories to explore how these topics operate as sites of strategic capital intraconversion.
Tope Folarin states that “Great Expectations is a Künstlerroman, a novel about the coming of age of an artist” nestled “within the carapace of a political novel” (Folarin). Cunningham’s choice to write a coming of age story within a political framework is interesting enough, but even stranger is the framework’s specificity. Cunningham’s novel does not only carry the general shape of an American political campaign; it undeniably takes place in 2008, and “the Candidate” is undeniably Barack Obama. One explanation may have to do with the fact that Barack Obama was, and still is, a uniquely ‘literary’ president. During his 2008 campaign, the young Obama proved remarkably adept at leveraging the power of language to his advantage. A plethora of scholars have demonstrated the ways in which Obama’s early speeches utilize specific and deliberate rhetorical devices and narrative structures to magnify his persuasion (Toal 2009, Hammer 2010, Li 2011, Kayam and Galily 2012, Sanghara 2021). Other scholars have discussed Obama’s first memoir, Dreams From My Father, within a literary rather than political framework. Isabel Kalous describes this strand of scholarship as analyzing “how the narrative invokes canonical male-authored works of self-assertion and self-discovery, such as Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), by working through conceptualizations of Black masculine identity, selfhood, and community” (Kalous 2022). Obama is also something of a literary figure himself due to his immense symbolic importance in American culture—once the embodiment of ‘hope and change,’ the modern day Obama has become, for some, a wistful image of nostalgia for a pre-Trumpian era of presidential civility, intellectualism, and decency (‘Remember when our president could read?’). By mythologizing Obama as “The Candidate,” Cunningham explores the former president’s symbolic role in American culture, unpacking the construction and consequences of Obama’s political iconization.
Obama wrote in 2023 that “books have always shaped how I experience the world…the simple act of writing helped me develop my own identity—all of which would prove vital as a citizen, as a community organizer, and as president” (Obama 2023). Obama continues to demonstrate an interest in literature through his summer reading list—an annual compilation of favorite titles posted to Medium, Instagram, and the Obama Foundation website. By curating a summer reading list, Obama operates as a mediator for middlebrow literary culture. In The New Literary Middlebrow, Beth Driscoll posits that “middlebrow literary practices rely on cultural authorities to certify the value of texts and modes of reading” (27). One such “mediator,” according to Driscoll, “is the critic, who endorses the value of a book and the acquisition of cultural capital by readers” (26). Obama released his original summer reading list in August 2009, during his family’s first holiday since moving into the White House. Since then, Obama has released his recommended reading list thirteen more times—a list for nearly every year since he took office (with the exceptions of 2013 and 2014). The lists consist of anywhere from three (2010) to fourteen (2024) books, accompanied by a brief, cheery statement and an invitation for recommendations from the audience. While no accessible data currently exists on the precise impact of an Obama recommendation on sales, it is clear that his name carries weight. A simple Google search for “Barack Obama’s reading list” yields thousands of results from publishers, bookstores, libraries, blogs, news and entertainment sites, and magazines directing their readers toward the objects of Obama’s literary approval. Goodreads, the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations, is home to several dozen compilations of Obama’s reading list. Penguin Random House’s articles on the list even include an “Add to Cart” button underneath their descriptions of the books—a direct invitation to buy (PRH).
Making it onto Obama’s list, then, means winning a sort of literary prize—where the Obama name goes, a boost to a book’s prestige, visibility, and sales are sure to follow. James F. English, in his book The Economy of Prestige, calls prizes “the single best instrument for negotiating transactions between cultural and economic, cultural and social, or cultural and political capital—which is to say that they are our most effective institutional agents of capital intraconversion” (10). Through Obama’s endorsement, the former president’s embodied cultural capital is converted into institutionalized cultural capital for the books and authors he recommends. Next, agents in the field of production—the institutional spaces occupied by publishers and retailers—use the books’ institutionalized cultural capital to produce economic capital (sales revenue). On Google Books and Amazon, Obama’s name appears without fail in descriptions of the books he recommends, alongside other prominent mediators of literary culture (“New York Times Bestseller!” “A Good Morning America Book Club Pick!”). In short, the symbolic power of Obama’s name is an active participant in various fields of literary culture, directly influencing the conversion and flow of capital.
Furthermore, Obama’s summer reading list epitomizes the nakedly symbolic nature of an effective mediator’s power. His list is bare-bones; it doesn’t come with a description of the books’ plots, an analysis of their themes, or interviews with their authors. Explicit criteria for selection are, unlike traditional literary awards, unusually absent. Despite his role as a former president and politician, Obama’s reading lists provide no social or political context whatsoever for their content. Instead, once a year, the list simply arrives: a group of titles and authors stamped with a name. It is because of these absences that Obama’s reading list becomes the barest possible form of middlebrow mediation: in the absence of an explicit explanation of a book’s value, Obama’s name itself—and everything it represents—becomes the reason you should read.
Mirroring Cunningham’s choices in Great Expectations, Obama’s presentation choices have minimized politics, transforming himself from a shaper of policy to a symbol of cultural authority. This move—from political to symbolic power—is an unsurprising one for Obama, who has focused much attention in recent years on bolstering, utilizing, and capitalizing on his cultural influence. Post-presidency, Obama and the former First Lady Michelle received a collective $65 million advance from Penguin Random House’s Crown Publishing Group for their respective memoirs–the largest advance in PRH’s history. In February of 2021, Obama launched a podcast with Bruce Springsteen on Spotify and, with Michelle, announced film and series projects from their media company Higher Ground Productions, which partners with Netflix and Audible. The Obamas’ stated goals are to amplify diverse American stories: “Crip Camp” charted the disability rights movement and “American Factory” won an Oscar for its depiction of post-industrial life in small-town Ohio (NPR 2018). While these pieces of media are clearly progressive, the emphasis is on ‘American values’ rather than support for a specific political project or piece of legislation. Obama’s symbolic power is a symptom of his presidential influence; mentions of his undeniable cultural authority have existed since 2008, when John McCain’s campaign ran ads questioning whether being a “celebrity” gave Obama the qualifications to serve as president (Associated Press). In the same year, the political pundit Dr. Jack Wheeler criticized what he viewed as a lack of substance behind the Obama craze, famously describing the Democratic nominee as “an eloquently tailored empty suit” (Wheeler).
Obama’s reading list, too, is an “empty suit”—a statement of aesthetic judgment and authority devoid of a clear politics or agenda. The list’s simplicity serves a function: the more objective aesthetic authority Obama has, the more Obama can project objectivity in political matters—a liberal high priest above the fray of politics’ day-to-day toil. Using the armor of aesthetic objectivity, Obama becomes reliable to a broader subsection of people as an arbitrator for and commentator on societal issues. The list, read this way, is part of a larger project Obama has conducted since 2008: to curate a form of political and cultural influence closer to the power of a judge than to the power of an executive.
Great Expectations has a similar view of Obama. Cunningham’s novel props up “The Candidate” as the shining center of a solar system around whom money and prestige revolve. Early on in his job as a political fundraiser, David notes that “the candidate’s time was currency. He would alight on a city for a few hours or, greater miracle, an entire day, and the job of that town’s fundraiser was to fill his time with parties yielding checks” (Cunningham 19). The wealthy donors that David courts express little pretext of a specific policy agenda, or even a desire to further an economically advantageous piece of legislation. Instead, “these were the kinds of people who dreamed of political appointments and ambassadorships, invitations from the president to state dinners and holiday parties” (18). The Candidate’s time is “currency” in a purely symbolic sense. For the donors, proximity to the Senator—“a story of how you knew him when”—is a mark of prestige, a means to secure potential future advantages (18). Of course, the Candidate’s time is also “currency” in that it brings in campaign donations. In short, Cunningham portrays the early Obama campaign as a site of capital intraconversion, in which policy takes a backseat to the strategic exchange of cultural and economic capital.
Even for David, a nobody, proximity to the Candidate brings status. At the beginning of the novel, David is a prospectless twenty-year-old and recent college dropout with a young daughter. After his employer Beverly brings him onto the campaign team, David finds himself interacting with a slew of wealthy, influential individuals, including one of the campaign’s wealthiest donors, Earnest Blackshear. Cunningham pays careful attention to the genealogy of David’s newfound cultural capital: “I learned something about names and their proximity to other names…some of [Blackshear’s] prestige had started, within hours, to blur onto [Beverly]… And in a more muted way—via RSVP—I caught some of the runoff too” (35-36). By equating the movement of prestige with the downward trickle of water, Cunningham integrates the idea of capital intraconversion within the campaign narrative. David’s physical and mental development throughout Great Expectations is indicative of his increased access to cultural, economic, and social capital. As he watches the Candidate declare victory on election night, he recognizes that he’d “learned at a distance from the Candidate… a language of signs [he] hadn’t known before… [he] was now fluent” (253). This language includes body language and dress, two subtle signs of status: during his first interaction with Obama, David feels “slightly shabby” and “unconsciously…straighten[s] out” (15). Along the campaign trail, David collects not only cheques but a new suit and shoes. Through his newfound proximity to the campaign’s wealthy donors, David realizes, “I’d somehow groped my way to the middle of the world…another America had come striding into view” (74). For David, the “world” of America’s wealthy donor class consists not of social ladders, but of orbits—with the symbol that is the Candidate at the center.
Despite all this, Cunningham resists focusing exclusively on the specific political conditions that make David’s development realizable. David’s experiences on the campaign trail undoubtedly take up space, yet they remain secondary to the novel’s primary focus: his intellectual and spiritual growth. David’s coming of age as a writer is the heart of Cunningham’s literary project. In one of the novel’s most compelling passages, another staffer scolds David for examining a painting by Renoir during a party consisting of young staffers: “‘You should be taking notes instead of checking out nudes… This party’s great material’” (42). David’s attention is caught between artistic and material concerns; his interest in Renoir comes into conflict with the potential future advantages of documenting campaign events. In writing his debut novel, Cunningham’s attention is also split; his novel attempts to document both a political campaign and a man’s personal development. Through this passage, Cunningham demonstrates the conflict between Great Expectations’ obligation to its structure—the narrative framework of Obama’s campaign—and the novel’s propensity to slip into exploring more elemental themes like art, God, and manhood.
Tope Folarin reads the novel’s conflict sociologically, asserting that “one potential function of the campaign frame—beyond the fact that at least some of this novel is clearly drawn from Cunningham’s own experiences—is to pull readers into a story that some might otherwise avoid: the story of a Black man who is reevaluating his relationship with God and who yearns to be an artist” (Folarin). As Folarin points out, Cunningham—just like his protagonist—has utilized his own proximity to the Obama name to create the conditions for his successful move from critic to literary novelist. Cunningham published Great Expectations in 2024, during another historic presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris—a time when readerly interest in another, earlier presidential run was sure to be at an all time high. However, the book’s paratext subtly resists the notion that the book is about Obama. Great Expections’s artistic cover, advance praise given exclusively by authors of literary fiction, and its lack of overt political imagery (no red, white, and blue; marked as “a novel” rather than “a political memoir”) give the work a literary, rather than historical or political, shape. The novel’s simultaneous evocation and minimization of the 2008 political landscape allows Cunningham to infuse a serious work of literature with a dose of culturally relevant political specificity, attracting readers and critics. As Dan Sinykin argues, autofictional works —Great Expectations, I argue, being one of them—“express… the conditions of [their] production and negotiate those conditions to pry from them symbolic and financial capital” (475). Through his past proximity to Obama, Cunningham ultimately creates the conditions to reap the financial benefits of literary success. Simultaneously, Great Expectations’ lack of political specificity elevates it from ‘political memoir’ to ‘novel.’ Cunningham’s choice to manufacture distance between Obama and the reader—to minimize political specificity—also demonstrates his constant negotiation with the material circumstances surrounding the production of his novel. On the other hand, in his reading list and elsewhere in his post-presidential career, Barack Obama’s minimization of political specificity allows him to transcend the more capitalistic aspects of the political and literary worlds, thus becoming a source of aesthetic and moral wisdom. Both men, to put it simply, can have their capital and eat it too.
Like Jack Wheeler, David comes to see the Candidate as an “empty suit”—a symbol without substance. At the end of Great Expectations, David watches the Candidate, who has just been elected President, take the stage for his acceptance speech. As he listens, he admits that “[he] couldn’t admire the candidate…now that [he] could interpret the symbols he offered in such profusion. He was a moving statue, made to stand in a great square and eke out noise” (page #). Though the Candidate may be a symbol of hope, change, and progress, David’s revelation suggests that he is more like an idol than a changemaker; more of a collective idea than a force for material change. David then reflects inward, declaring that “I wanted to be…more legible than a symbol, more vivid and musical…than even the most laureled statue could ever be…I pulled out my phone and opened the camera, stretched my arm unprayerfully toward the stage, and took a picture” (253). David’s statement, and his subsequent act of ‘capturing’ Obama in an image (and, simultaneously, in a novel), is a declaration of autonomy. In his “unprayerful” rejection of Obama the symbol, Cunningham suggests that David has begun the process of throwing off meaning imposed upon him by others and, through the power of artistic creation, of claiming and creating meaning for himself. Ironically, however, Cunningham also recognizes the limits of artistic autonomy—no matter what David may wish to believe, a photograph of Obama will inevitably be more interesting to a wider audience than a self-portrait. It doesn’t matter whether Obama’s face or name are actually in the book—they are the sponsoring power behind Cunningham’s work.
Obama’s summer reading list is a shaper of culture and a tool for the positioning of his post-presidential identity. This identity is more symbolic than historical; more an arbiter of cultural value than of political commitment. Obama’s list is a bid for the autonomy of political and cultural authority, divorced from the dirtiness of day-to-day politics. As Cunningham recognizes, however, this decontextualized authority is a construction. No man, book, or list exists in isolation in the modern literary ecosystem, despite the advantages to presenting it as such. Cunningham, ever perceptive, appears cheekily aware of his delicate dance as a writer. By evoking the life and legacy of another literary giant—Charles Dickens—in his debut novel’s title, Cunningham coyly acknowledges and embraces his reliance on names other than his own. If Obama’s bid for cultural authority is to remain successful, it must project total faith in itself; it cannot reveal the mechanisms of its production and success. On the other hand, by both utilizing and undermining inflated claims to autonomy, Great Expectations finds its authority in its willingness to critique itself.
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