Vinson Cunningham’s remarkable book Great Expectations is set during a familiar presidential campaign.

Early in Vinson Cunningham’s sophisticated debut novel—cheekily titled Great Expectations—the narrator, David Hammond, stands in the front room of a Brooklyn Heights brownstone, watching his boss give a speech. He looks, David thinks, “like a drawing room orator out of Henry James.” James didn’t write many political novels, but the number of contemporary political novels referencing Henry James must be equally rare. Small details like the height of a woman’s heels or the way people refer to visiting Martha’s Vineyard as going “on island” convey precise information about, above all, class, the occulted subject of Great Expectations. A pastor addressing his flock “held the microphone loosely but securely, like how good tennis players hold the racket.” He describes Cornel West, an early supporter of the senator who did not receive an invitation to the inauguration after the two men drifted apart ideologically, as standing “in the backmost regions of the Mall, behind the reflecting pool, wearing his mortician’s costume and, on his face, a smoldering mask.” A family friend who goes missing from Chicago may have “dissolved like a sugar crystal into the deeper and less urban Midwest.” The lovely aptness of Cunningham’s metaphors makes the loops and whorls of David’s search for a fitting sense of himself a pleasure to follow. He does love it when one of the few Black people at, say, a classical music rehearsal makes a point of greeting him, saying “You don’t often see us in spaces like these.” What a gift, he thinks, that “someone—an utter stranger, a singer or scholar” should be sincerely glad to see him, and express “a kind of love.” This unbidden love particularly appeals to his passivity and makes him reflect that, “in this way, 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.