A top-shelf intellectual bildungsroman.
A young man reckons with race, family, and disillusionment on a presidential campaign.
David, the narrator of Cunningham’s elegant and contemplative debut, is a 20-something Black man who in 2007 has stumbled into a minor role on the fundraising team for a U.S. senator and upstart presidential candidate. (He’s unnamed, but it’s plainly Barack Obama.) David needs something to believe in: A young father, he’s flunked out of college and is making ends meet by tutoring. Even so, the campaign’s high-flown hope-and-change rhetoric is a world removed from his job greeting wealthy donors, accepting checks, and helping to arrange more meet-and-greets. So he contemplates how he fits in as he scrutinizes the backgrounds of the high-dollar donors and celebrity boosters, particularly the Black ones. (Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and André Leon Talley have brief cameos.) The campaign’s conclusion is no surprise, of course, but the book is alive in its intellectual detours, with Cunningham considering religion, race, sex, film, politics, fatherhood, and more. (David’s memories are particularly affecting when it comes to music, especially his experience singing in church.) The tone of these asides is essayistic—Cunningham is a cultural critic at the New Yorker—yet none of them feel stapled-on. Rather, the campaign offers a sensible springboard for contemplation of pretty much everything. As David’s mentor, Beverly, tells him, “The real thing is: How about you get some power and then use it?” She’s talking about Black leadership, but her comment also relates to David’s sense of self. Cunningham’s choice of title is nervy, but though the story only vaguely echoes Dickens (Beverly is Havisham-adjacent), it perfectly encapsulates the kinds of anxiety that follow a smart young man still coming into being. Why let a perfectly good title go to waste?
A top-shelf intellectual bildungsroman.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593448236
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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