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. The house belongs to a publisher, a “white woman in soft clothes,” well-off enough to own a Jenny Holzer artwork, and while David’s boss is never named—he’s referred to as either “the Senator” or “the candidate”—the man is identical in every respect to Barack Obama. Cunningham, a staff writer for the New Yorker, worked for Obama, so presumably some of this novel is drawn from his experience.
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