Book Review: A coming-of-age story of a young Black man who works for an Obama-adjacent candidate

Vinson Cunningham, theater critic for the New Yorker, makes a cheeky move with his debut novel, “Great Expectations.” He borrows the title of Charles Dickens’ masterpiece to tell a different sort of coming-of-age story. His is about a young Black man, David, who goes to work for the first presidential campaign of an unnamed U.S. senator trying to become the nation’s first African American chief executive. We meet him soon after he has flunked out of college and returned home to New York to live with his mother and help care for the child he fathered with a woman referred to only as “the dancer.” To make ends meet, he starts to tutor the son of a glamorous Black investment banker and early patron of the junior senator. With cameos of real-life celebrities including Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the late André Leon Talley, as well as scenes set in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, the redoubt of the Black bourgeoisie, this book is sure to be catnip to those who believed in that hopey changey thing of long ago.