Vinson Cunningham Makes a Monument in Time
Criticism as elegy, and business-casual as clubwear
Vinson Cunningham’s experience writing his debut novel has almost perfectly overlapped with his time as a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is currently the magazine’s theater critic. (He has also written compellingly about everything from K-Mart plastic shopping bags to Trump’s mugshot to the comedian Tracy Morgan.) It makes sense then that the novel, cheekily titled Great Expectations, is full of what you might call the critic’s gaze: the protagonist, a young man named David who’s fallen into working in the fundraising office for a presidential campaign, is constantly watching the people and objects around him. He eyes the luxurious furnishings in the homes of wealthy donors; he pays careful attention to the suits people wear and what they seem to signify. Cunningham wrote several hundred pages of a first draft of Great Expectations and then threw away all but one: a scene of David standing in an opulent home, looking at a painting. This, he realized, was the heart of the book: a young, Black man looking hard at the inner workings of power and prestige.
Great Expectations is a novel about a presidential campaign that changes America— one based on Cunningham’s time working on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. But just as much, it’s about what’s at stake in our ability to see the world around us, and how a novel, like criticism, can function as a form of elegy: how one of its powers is to “stand athwart time” and trap a moment, a person, an experience, in amber.
“You could just call it noticing. You could just call it description. But the function of what we call criticism is to stop time. To stand athwart time and assert your love for experience — to say “Stop here! Here is a monument in honor of this thing that has happened.” The sort of funerary purpose of the eulogy, that kind of oratory, is to say, *Here* *was* *this*! Here was this person, here was this performance.”
—Vinson Cunningham
In the conversation, I ask Vinson what parts of 2008 (the year in which the novel is set) felt extra important to get right. His answer touches both the abstract —the optimism of that moment, which the Obama campaign was tapping into, for example— but also textural, musical: T-Pain, Estelle’s “American Boy,” the fact that for a while there everyone was wearing business casual to clubs.
That’s sort of the tone of this conversation, and the tenor of Cunningham’s writing broadly. He’s so good at analyzing America in the wide frame. “I have been obsessed and intrigued all my life with how writers think this country through,” he says. At the same time, he approaches the granularities of the world —oddity, detail— with such humor and care. It makes him both enlightening and fun to talk to, and to read.
Mentioned in the episode:
Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries
Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers
Christian Lorentzen on autofiction
“American Boy” by Estelle
Elif Batuman’s The Idiot
Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act
Not mentioned in the ep, but a charming read: Vinson’s Grub Street Diet.
That’s all for this week! Make sure to check out our recent issues featuring transcripts of our conversation with Ocean Vuong— the third and final installment of that comes out next week. And if you like what we’re doing here, please share this with a friend.
Til next time-
Jordan