Know Your Enemy - Political Fictions (w/ Vinson Cunningham)

Matt and Sam talk to Vinson Cunningham about his debut novel, "Great Expectations," political theater, and Barack Obama.

Duration: 1h 8m
Broadcast on: 31 Aug 2024
Audio Format: other

Today, we're joined by one of our favorite writers and thinkers, Vinson Cunningham, to discuss his excellent debut novel, Great Expectations, which tells the story of brilliant-but-unmoored young black man, David Hammond, who finds himself recruited — by fluke, folly, or fate — onto a historic presidential campaign for a certain charismatic Illinois senator. A staff writer at the New Yorker, Vinson also worked for Obama's 2008 campaign in his early twenties. (He bears at least some resemblance to his protagonist.) And his novel provides a wonderful jumping-off point for a deep discussion of political theater, the novel of ideas, race, faith, the meaning of Barack Obama, and the meaning of Kamala Harris.

Also discussed: Christopher Isherwood, Saul Bellow, Garry Wills, Ralph Ellison, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Pierce, and Kobe Bryant! If you can't get enough Vinson, check out his podcast with Naomi Fry and Alexandra Schwartz, Critics at Large.

Sources:

Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations: A Novel (2024)

— "The Kamala Show," The New Yorker, Aug 19, 2024

— "Searching for the Star of the N.B.A. Finals," The New Yorker, June 21, 2024

— "Many and One," Commonweal, Dec 14, 2020.

Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (2001)

Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992)

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

— Shadow and Act (1964)

David Haglund, "Leaving the Morman Church, After Reading a Poem," New Yorker Radio Hour, Mar 25, 2016.

Phil Jackson, Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior (1995)

Glenn Loury, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative (2024)

Matthew Sitman, "Saving Calvin from Clichés: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson," Commonweal, Oct 5, 2017

...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon so you can listen to all of our premium episodes!

All right, welcome listeners to episode 99 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sippman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here, as always, with my great friend, Sam Etherbell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. This is a good one. It's a good one. And a little different, too, which is nice. We've been heavy on the politics, and this episode is about politics, too, but it's approaching it from a slightly different angle, which is fiction, the novel, and in particular, a great recent novel from our great friend Vincent Cunningham titled Great Expectations. Yeah, it was really, really fun. We love Vincent. He's a great critic and a great novelist. This is his first novel for listeners. We're wondering what this has to do with Know Your Enemy. Vincent's novel is the story of a young man, a young black man, who is kind of thrust into Obama's 2008 campaign for president. And it's a sort of coming-of-age story about this young man who resembles Vincent in many respects, but is not exactly Vincent finding himself in relation to this kind of great historical event that's going on and in relation to the candidate, Barack Obama, in the story. That's pretty much all you need to know about the book, because it really follows the contours of the beginnings of an election campaign, the kind of rising action of him starting to win, and then it really ends with Obama's inauguration. So everything else, we can fill it in the course of the episode. Yes, as the novel's promotional copy put it, a historic presidential campaign changes the trajectory of a young black man's life in this coming-of-age story that captures the soul of America. Yeah, and for those who are not familiar with Vincent, he's one of my favorite writers, and Sam, I know yours too. He's a staff writer and theater critic at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and he's somewhat recently joined the podcast racket. He's on the podcast Critics at Large. Oh, yeah, New Yorker Critics at Large, which I listened to pretty frequently. It's really, really good. We didn't talk about it on the podcast, but he also wrote some beautiful essays for you for Common Wheel back in the day. Yes, that was one of my greatest clues as an editor was to get Vincent to write for me at Common Wheel. I'll put that in the show notes, actually. He wrote a really incredible piece on the Eucharist, and we talk about religion a lot in this episode too, because it's so embedded in American politics, but also a big part of the novel. Yeah, and a big part of Vincent's life and thinking, "Yes," listeners may intuit what will be interesting about this conversation beyond just getting to talk about fiction and religion and some of our favorite books with one of our favorite writers, but the story of this book about the Obama campaign has sort of special resonance now because there's complicated ways in which Kamala Harris is inheriting the legacy of Obama '08 and of Obama's way of relating to the country and to his blackness and his identity, and all of that comes up in the course of the conversation. So there's still plenty of high quality tea leaf reading. Don't apologize. I won't apologize for talking about a novel, but there's plenty of stuff that's highly relevant to the listeners, whether or not they are big readers of novels or not. Yes, let's get some housekeeping items. As always, we're grateful to our partners at Descent. One thing they do for us, in addition to being sued with us, is sponsor the podcast, and if you subscribe on our Patreon at patreon.com/knowyourenemy. For $10 a month, you get a free digital subscription to Descent. Please take advantage of that. And for $5 a month, if you subscribe on our Patreon, you get access to all of our bonus episodes, included our patented election season ranked punditry. So sign up for that. More and more of that to come, of course. And as always, we want to thank our intrepid producer, Jesse Brennan, and Will Epstein, who does the music for the podcast. All right, should we get to it? Yes, we should. Here's our episode with Vincent Cunningham about his novel, Great Expectations. Enjoy. All right, it's a Descent honor to finally have on Know Your Enemy, a friend of ours, a friend of the pod, Vincent Cunningham. Welcome, Vincent. Thank you. This is, like, my dream. Thank you for having me.

We're very excited for this. And, you know, I was thinking, this is the first novel I believe we're talking about on Know Your Enemy, our first foray into fiction. And we're here to talk

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam talk to Vinson Cunningham about his debut novel, "Great Expectations," political theater, and Barack Obama.