book review of great expectations

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

A book review

The very title of this book indicates the confidence of conscious genius. In a new aspirant for public favor, such a title might have been a good device to attract attention; but the most famous novelist of the day, watched by jealous rivals and critics, could hardly have selected it, had he not inwardly felt the capacity to meet all the expectations he raised. We have read it, as we have read all Mr. Dickens's previous works, as it appeared in installments, and can testify to the felicity with which expectation was excited and prolonged, and to the series of surprises which accompanied the unfolding of the plot of the story. In no other of his romances has the author succeeded so perfectly in at once stimulating and baffling the curiosity of his readers. He stirred the dullest minds to guess the secret of his mystery; but, so far as we have learned, the guesses of his most intellectual readers have been almost as wide of the mark as those of the least apprehensive. It has been all the more provoking to the former class, that each surprise was the result of art, and not of trick; for a rapid review of previous chapters has shown that the materials of a strictly logical development of the story were freely given. Even after the first, second, third, and even fourth of these surprises gave their pleasing electric shocks to intelligent curiosity, the denouement was still hidden, though confidentially foretold. The plot of the romance is therefore universally admitted to be the best that Dickens has ever invented. Its leading events are, as we read the story consecutively, artistically necessary, yet, at the same time, the processes are artistically concealed. We follow the movement of a logic of passion and character, the real premises of which we detect only when we are startled by the conclusions.

The plot of Great Expectations is also noticeable as indicating, better than any of his previous stories, the individuality of Dickens's genius. Everybody must have discerned in the action of his mind two diverging tendencies, which in this novel, are harmonized. He possess a singularly wide, clear, and minute power of accurate observation, both of things and of persons; but his observation, keen and true to actualities as it independently is, is not a dominant faculty, and is opposed or controlled by the strong tendency of his disposition to pathetic or humorous idealization. Perhaps in The Old Curiosity Shop these qualities are best seen in their struggle and divergence, and the result is a magnificent juxtaposition of romantic tenderness, melodramatic improbabilities, and broad farce. The humorous characterization is joyously exaggerated into caricature,--the serious characterization into romantic unreality. Richard Swiveller and Little Nell refuse to combine. There is abundant evidence of genius both in the humorous and pathetic parts, but the artistic impression is one of anarchy rather than unity.

In Great Expectations , on the contrary, Dickens seems to have attained the mastery of powers which formerly more or less mastered him. He has fairly discovered that he cannot, like Thackeray, narrate a story as if he were a mere looker-on, a mere knowing observer of what he describes and represents; and he has therefore taken observation simply as the basis of his plot and his characterization. As we read Vanity Fair and The Newcomes , we are impressed with the actuality of the persons and incidents. There is an absence of both directing ideas and disturbing idealizations. Everything drifts to its end, as in real life. In Great Expectations there is shown a power of external observation finer and deeper even than Thackeray's; and yet, owing to the presence of other qualities, the general impression is not one of objective reality. The author palpably uses his observations as materials for his creative faculties to work upon; he does not record, but invents; and he produces something which is natural only under conditions prescribed by his own mind. He shapes, disposes, penetrates, colors, and contrives everything, and the whole action is a series of events which could have occurred only in his own brain, and which it is difficult to conceive of as actually happening . And yet in none of his other works does he evince a shrewder insight into real life, and a clearer perception and knowledge of what is called the world . The book is, indeed, an artistic creation, and not a mere succession of humorous and pathetic scenes, and demonstrates that Dickens is now in the prime, and not in the decline of his great powers.

The characters of the novel also show how deeply it has been meditated; for, though none of them may excite the personal interest which clings to Sam Weller or little Dombey, they are better fitted to each other and the story in which they appear than is usual with Dickens. They all combine to produce the unity of impression which the work leaves on the mind. Individually they will rank among the most original of the author's creations. Magwitch and Joe Gargery, Jaggers and Wemmick, Pip and Herbert, Wopsle, Pumblechook, and "the Aged," Miss Havisham, Estella, and Biddy, are personages which the most assiduous readers of Dickens must pronounce positive additions to the characters his rich and various genius has already created.

Pip, the hero, from whose mind the whole representation takes its form and color, is admirably delineated throughout. Weak, dreamy, amiable, apprehensive, aspiring, inefficient, the subject and the victim of Great Expectations , his individuality is, as it were, diffused through the whole narrative. Joe is a noble character, with a heart too great for his powers of expression to utter in words, but whose patience, fortitude, tenderness, and beneficence shine lucidly through his confused and mangled English. Magwitch, the "warmint" who "grew up took up," whose memory extended only to that period of his childhood when he was "a-thieving turnips for his living" down in Essex, but in whom a life of crime had only intensified the feeling of gratitude for the one kind action of which he was the object, is hardly equalled in grotesque grandeur by anything which Dickens has previously done. The character is not only powerful in itself, but it furnishes pregnant and original hints to all philosophical investigators into the phenomena of crime. In this wonderful creation Dickens follows the maxim of the great master of characterization, and seeks "the soul of goodness in things evil."

The style of the romance is rigorously close to things. The author is so engrossed with the objects before his mind, is so thoroughly in earnest, that he has fewer of those humorous caprices of expression of which formerly he was wont to wanton. Some of the old hilarity and play of fancy is gone, but we hardly miss it in our admiration of the effects produced by his almost stern devotion to the main idea of his work. There are passages of description and narrative in which we are hardly conscious of his words, in our clear apprehension of the objects and incidents they convey. The quotable epithets and phrases are less numerous than in Dombey & Son and David Copperfield ; but the scenes and events impressed on the imagination are perhaps greater in number and more vivid in representation. The poetical element of the writer's genius, his modification of the forms, hues, and sounds of Nature by viewing them through the medium of an imagined mind, is especially prominent throughout the descriptions with which the work abounds. Nature is not only described, but individualized and humanized.

Altogether we take great joy in recording our conviction that Great Expectations is a masterpiece. We have never sympathized in the mean delight which some critics seem to experience in detecting the signs which subtly indicate the decay of power in creative intellects. We sympathize still less in the stupid and ungenerous judgements of those who find a still meaner delight in willfully asserting that the last book of a popular writer is unworthy of the genius which produced his first. In our opinion, Great Expectations is a work which proves that we may expect from Dickens a series of romances far exceeding in power and artistic skill the productions which have already given him such a preeminence among the novelists of the age.

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Great expectations, common sense media reviewers.

Fast-paced, moving Dickens classic of reversed fortune.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

Like all of his books after The Pickwick Papers, C

The moral of Great Expectations is an age-old one:

Pip is passionate, idealistic, and ambitious, but

No actual violence occurs in the book. There are r

There is smoking (mostly of pipes and cigars, and

Parents need to know that Great Expectations depicts life realistically, particularly the brutal circumstances of the poor in Victorian England. Dickens did not paint a rosy picture unless he was celebrating the kind, considerate, and generous. He held a great hatred for social injustice and apathy, and his…

Educational Value

Like all of his books after The Pickwick Papers , Charles Dickens' Great Expectations was written to educate and enlighten, as well as entertain. Readers learn about the class system in Victorian England through Pip's journey as he moves up the class scale from country lad to city gentleman. The Victorian Era was a time of great social upheaval and economic advancement, but Dickens is keen to show that Pip's accumulation of wealth and social status does not fully bridge the gap between his poor childhood and material success.

Positive Messages

The moral of Great Expectations is an age-old one: Money cannot buy happiness; happiness comes from within. Much of the author's own life is dramatized in this novel. Despite achieving huge success and wealth at an early age, money and fame never blinded Dickens to the divide between rich and poor, and to the miserable circumstances of the latter. Like George Bernard Shaw after him, Dickens used his popular entertainments as a pulpit to preach the inequities of capitalism and the dire need for reform.

Positive Role Models

Pip is passionate, idealistic, and ambitious, but he learns the consequences of having unrealistic goals. Magwitch, the escaped criminal, turns out to have Pip's best interests at heart.

Violence & Scariness

No actual violence occurs in the book. There are references to violence having happened, as in Orlick's attack on Mrs. Joe, which leaves her a brain-damaged mute and invalid, but it is not depicted and the reader learns of it after the fact.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

There is smoking (mostly of pipes and cigars, and always by men) and drinking, but this is extremely representative of life in England in the 1860s. Lower, middle, and upper classes all consumed alcohol with meals and as entertainment, albeit in different forms and rituals. Drinking -- even heavy drinking -- is historically accurate in a tale of these times, and does not adversely affect the events of the story.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Great Expectations depicts life realistically, particularly the brutal circumstances of the poor in Victorian England. Dickens did not paint a rosy picture unless he was celebrating the kind, considerate, and generous. He held a great hatred for social injustice and apathy, and his position is on full display in this novel and the 1947 film version.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say (1)
• Kids say (18)

Based on 1 parent review

My kids could not understand

What's the story.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS takes place during the mid-19th century, and tells the story of Pip, a young orphan in England's marsh country who is thrust onto the class ladder by a series of complex and coincidental circumstances that improve his economic and social status. Along his journey of self-discovery from youth to maturity, he learns the value of friendship, the power of romantic and familial love, and the ultimate meaning of wealth and material gain.

Is It Any Good?

Although many of the characters in this story are stereotypes, this makes them no less effective in telling the story. Charles Dickens is universally regarded as one of the greatest novelists who ever wrote in the English language, if not any language, and Great Expectations is considered, along with Bleak House , to be his best. Many of the characters are typical Dickens: quick sketches with colorfully descriptive names, representing a particular position and/or attitude. The adult characters include Magwitch, the terrifying escaped criminal who sets Pip's adventures in motion, the insane Miss Havisham, the greedy Pumblechook, and the complex and contradictory Wemmick -- in other words, a credible cross-section of adult personalities.

Nineteenth-century literature, with its demanding vocabulary and old-fashioned assumptions and manners, is not everyone's cup of tea, and this includes young readers. But it continues, over a century later, to win new fans who fall in love with the book at a young age. Like all of the author's work, the story is a fast-paced adventure with a compelling hero.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why this book has remained a beloved bestseller for more than 140 years, still delighting young and adult readers, and why it is often required reading in school.

Pip learns a number of life lessons throughout the story. What are they?

Do you think Pip and Estella are a good match?

Book Details

• Author : Charles Dickens
• Genre : Literary Fiction
• Topics : Adventures
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Penguin Classics
• Publication date : December 1, 1893
• Number of pages : 483
• Last updated : November 15, 2019

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'Great Expectations' Review

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Great Expectations is one of the most famous and much-loved novels by the great master of Victorian prose, Charles Dickens . Like all of his great novels, Great Expectations has Dickens's brilliant use of character and plot—along with an incredible sensibility and sympathy for the way that the British class system was constructed in the nineteenth century.

Great Expectations  Overview

The novel centers around a poor young man by the name of Pip, who is given the chance to make himself a gentleman by a mysterious benefactor. Great Expectations offers a fascinating view of the differences between classes during the Victorian era , as well as a great sense of comedy and pathos. The novel opens in an exciting vein. Pip is a young orphan who lives with his sister and her husband ( Joe ). When he is still a young boy, news arrives that a man has escaped from the local prison. Then, one day when he is crossing the moors near his house, Pip comes across the convict in hiding (Magwitch). Upon threat of his life, Pip brings food and tools to Magwitch, until Magwitch is recaptured. Pip continues to grow up, and one day is taken by an uncle to play at a rich woman’s house. This woman is the fabulous Miss Haversham who had been hurt terribly when she had been left at the altar and, though she is an old woman, still wears a tatty old wedding dress. Pip almost meets a young girl who, though she kisses him, treats him with contempt. Pip, despite the girl's cold treatment of him, falls in love with her and desperately wants to be a man of means so that he might be worthy to marry her.

Then, Jaggers (a lawyer) arrives to tell him that a mysterious benefactor has offered to pay for Pip to be made into a gentleman. Pip goes to London and soon is considered a man of great possibilities (and is, therefore, embarrassed by his roots and his former relations).

A Young Gentleman in  Great Expectations

Pip lives a young swell's life—enjoying his youth. He comes to believe that it was Miss Haversham who is providing him with the money—to prepare him for marrying Estella. But then, Magwitch barges into his room, revealing that he is a mysterious benefactor (he escaped from prison and went to Australia, where he made a fortune). Now, Magwitch is back in London, and Pip helps him to escape once again. In the meantime, Pip helps Miss Haversham comes to terms with the loss of her husband (she is caught up in a fire and eventually dies). Estella marries a country bumpkin with money (even though there is no love in the relationship, and he will treat her with cruelty). Despite Pip's best efforts—Magwitch is once more caught, and Pip can no longer live as a young gentleman. He and his friend leave the country and make their money by hard work. In the final chapter (one that Dickens rewrote), Pip returns to England and meets Estella in a graveyard. Her husband had died, and the book hints at a happy future for the two of them.

Class, Money & Corruption in  Great Expectations

Great Expectations depicts the differences between the classes, and how money can corrupt. The novel makes clear that money cannot buy love, nor does it guarantee happiness. One of the happiest—and most morally correct—people in the novel is Joe, Pip's sister's husband. And, Miss Havisham is one of the richest (as well as the most unhappy and loneliest).

Pip believes that if he can be a gentleman, he will have everything he wants from the world. His world collapses and he realizes that all his money has been based on Magwitch's dishonest earnings. And, Pip finally understands the true value of life.

Great Expectations features some of Dickens's greatest characters and one of his trademark convoluted plots. The novel is a fantastic read and a wonderful morality tale. Full of romance, courageousness, and hope— Great Expectations is a brilliant evocation of a time and place. Here's a view of the English class system that is both critical and realistic.

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Great expectations, by charles dickens, recommendations from our site.

“What the rest of Great Expectations shows is that having Christmas lasting all the way through your life might not be a good thing. Having a Santa Claus figure who keeps throwing gifts and money at you when they’re not necessarily wanted or deserved might be a handicap.” Read more...

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Robert Douglas-Fairhurst , Literary Scholar

“It is one of the most perfect novels ever written.It’s got a wonderful plot. It’s about good and bad money, you don’t know who Pip’s benefactor is, you’re wrong-footed—as he is—all the time. It’s about terrible damage. It’s got this fantastic suspense about what happens to Magwitch. It’s sad, but also it’s got wonderful humour in it and wonderful characters. It’s got Wemmick, one of the first commuters. It’s just brilliant.” Read more...

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“It’s a prime example of a good analysis, because Pip comes to see where he has been blind, where his moral values have gone wonky” Read more...

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“It is a novel not just about survival of the fittest. It is also a novel about the ways in which you make your way in the world, and how it is that you can reach a place in life which is different from where you started.” Read more...

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John Sutherland , Literary Scholar

Think of Great Expectations , a novel which most people think of as quite homey and not particularly sexual. Molly, Jaggers’ servant, is Estella’s mother; she had an illegitimate relationship with Magwitch. So a central figure in the novel is a bastard. You also have the Havisham plot, with the absconding husband (or fiancé) Compeyson. You can see lots of evidence of sexual life in the plotting of Victorian novels.

The best books on Sex in Victorian Literature recommended by Claire Jarvis

Other books by Charles Dickens

The mystery of edwin drood by charles dickens, the pickwick papers by charles dickens, what christmas is as we grow older by charles dickens, a christmas carol: and other stories by charles dickens, a christmas carol by charles dickens, nicholas nickleby by charles dickens, our most recommended books, great expectations by charles dickens, wuthering heights by emily brontë, jane eyre by charlotte brontë, twelfth night by william shakespeare, the portrait of a lady by henry james, william wordsworth: the major works by stephen gill (editor).

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Book Reviews

Famous father had highest 'expectations'.

Heller McAlpin

Great Expectations

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You would think, wouldn't you, that the man who created such heartrendingly sympathetic children as Oliver Twist, Pip, Tiny Tim and poor Little Nell would be a stupendous father. Well, the Charles Dickens who emerges from Robert Gottlieb's Great Expectations, a compulsively readable if occasionally repetitive account of what happened to the great writer's brood of seven sons and three daughters, is not so wonderful.

Daddy Dearest welcomed each new addition to his family with bemused delight — if a tendency to blame the rapid proliferation on his wife Catherine. Dickens was an attentive father, strict but playful with his children when they were young — and much revered and loved by them. But soon after his boys were in long pants — around age 5 — he was busily mapping their careers, often overseas, with an eye to relieving himself of the burden of supporting them as soon as possible. Worse, he was already expressing disappointment, to both them and the world, that they "lacked not only his genius but his compulsion to work," his self-confidence and his "rigor and discipline."

Great Expectations joins an avalanche of publications marking the bicentennial of Dickens' Feb. 7, 1812, birth, including Claire Tomalin's absorbing investigative biography, Charles Dickens: A Life, and Christopher Hitchens' final Vanity Fair essay , "Charles Dickens's Inner Child." What Gottlieb's book adds to this profusion is an accessible, sharply focused and opinionated portrait of what the "magical" but dominating father wrought at home. As in his previous book, Lives and Letters , the former editor-in-chief of Knopf and The New Yorker brings an enticingly light touch to his scholarship, resulting in a book that reads like haute literary gossip.

Gottlieb wisely highlights two great dividing lines in the lives of Dickens' offspring: their parents' separation in 1858 and their father's death in 1870. The first occurred when Dickens, with the ruthlessness of a king, banished his corpulent, exhausted and, he claimed, dull and lethargic wife of 22 years, "packing her off to her own establishment (with a generous settlement) and removing her children from her." Gottlieb does not hide his outrage at Dickens' "odious behavior," which was spurred, he believes, by a sort of midlife crisis and infatuation with the young actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he possibly had an illegitimate 11th child who died in infancy. The repercussions of the Dickens' nasty separation included social ostracism for their two surviving daughters and an added urgency to disperse all those distracting, needy sons, exiling five of them to the far ends of the Earth in search of opportunities.

Robert Gottlieb is the author of several books. He previously served as editor of both The New Yorker and Alfred A. Knopf. Michael Lionstar/Farrar, Straus and Giroux hide caption

Robert Gottlieb is the author of several books. He previously served as editor of both The New Yorker and Alfred A. Knopf.

How disappointing were the children? Gottlieb cherry-picks lively quotes from Dickens' letters in which he complains of "having brought up the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves." Several of the sons who were sent as teens to join the Navy, the Indian Army, the Canadian Mounties or to manage sheep stations in Australia, lived and died in debt. Gambling, liquor and congenital heart ailments contributed to their early demise.

The two sons who were allowed to remain in England and were given a chance to discover their own vocations — literary editor and lawyer — led the happiest, most successful lives. Dickens' favorite daughter, Kate, also achieved success, as a child portraitist. This leads Gottlieb to wonder how the others might have fared had they been kept at home and given "time to develop at their own speed" — which of course reflects contemporary American child-rearing philosophy. Gottlieb doesn't fully acknowledge that Dickens' decisions regarding his sons' education (including boarding school at age 7) and career options were hardly uncommon in Victorian England.

As for Dickens' greater sympathy for his fictional children than for his actual offspring, Gottlieb offers a plausible, if much simplified, explanation: "All his tragic child victims are stand-ins" for Dickens himself as a boy. In other words, Dickens' "rage and self-pity over what he saw as his harrowing childhood" — and his pride at having overcome it without help from anyone — left him with little empathy for the travails of his own relatively fortunate children. Yet, as Gottlieb makes clear in this book that raises intriguing questions about parental pressures and expectations, Dickens' progeny remained devoted to him and his legacy throughout their lives.

The Book Corner Chronicles

Book Reviews

“Great Expectations” By Charles Dickens Review

Great Expectations charts the progress of Pip from childhood through often painful experiences to adulthood, as he moves from the Kent marshes to busy, commercial London, encountering a variety of extraordinary characters ranging from Magwitch, the escaped convict, to Miss Havisham, locked up with her unhappy past and living with her ward, the arrogant, beautiful Estella. Pip must discover his true self, and his own set of values and priorities. Whether such values allow one to prosper in the complex world of early Victorian England is the major question posed by Great Expectations, one of Dickens’s most fascinating, and disturbing, novels.

This book really surprised me a lot because I was expecting to not like this one, but I found to actually be a pretty decent book. Even thou I am not the biggest fan of this book I still found it enjoyable and interesting at times.

It’s important to say that this book is far from Charles Dickens’s best work, however it isn’t the worst.

The plot here was quite interesting to be fully honest here, and there was something unique about it which really caught my attention. Even thou I need couple of breaks from this book while reading it, I still found it to be pretty good read.

The characters here were pretty good to be honest. I needed up liking some of them but at the same time there were characters which I totally didn’t care about. Which I can accept if there were some good characters as Philip “Pip” Pirrip, Estella and Miss Havisham. 

The writing style was very good in this one. I didn’t expect it to be that good but it was. This fact made me interested in reading more of Charles Dickens books.

After reading this book I understand why people love this book so much even thou I am far from loving this book.

I found this book to be very enjoyable and interesting at times which I haven’t expect happening but of course it did.

I Give This Book 3 / 5

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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - review

The story revolves around the year 1812. A 6-year old orphan boy Philip Pirrip (known as Pip) was raised by his sister and her husband. Joe Gargery (Pip's sister's husband) was a blacksmith and a kind man. His sister Mrs. Joe had nothing good to say to Pip. Pip was a boy without any expectations. One December afternoon day he happens to meet a convict in the churchyard, who scares Pip to steal food for him and get a file to free him from his leg shackles. Pip stole some food items and a bottle of brandy from his sister's house – this was his first act of guilt.

During one of the visit of Uncle Pumblechook, he introduced Pip to Miss Havisham. This visit changed Pip's life. Miss Havisham was an unmarried old lady who was abandoned on her wedding day. Pip develops a strong crush for Estella who is Miss Havisham's adopted daughter. Being rejected in love Miss Havisham raised Estella in a cruel hearted way who will break men's hearts.

Later one day a lawyer informs Pip that he has inherited a lot of money from an anonymous benefactor and must leave for London immediately. All this while Pip was believing that the anonymous benefactor was Miss Havisham but one day he learnt that the benefactor was a petty criminal Abel Magwitch, alias Provis. In the meantime Mrs. Joe who was not keeping good health passed away.

Magwitch was eventually convicted and executed. On his deathbed Pip learns that Magwitch was Estella's father! Pip in the meantime travels overseas and returns back after 11-years. During this time Mr. Joe had married again. When he visits Miss Havisham's house (who was no more), he finds a reformed Estella wandering; Estella's marriage did not last long and now she accepts Pip as her friend.

The story ends with Pip and Estella getting married and he says "I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her."

Through this book, the author draws on his experiences of life and people. The author tells a fictional story in a way which leaves an impression in the mind of the reader as if the story is a non-fiction. The author portrays himself as Pip, an orphan who faces various challenges in life. This book is highly recommendable for all age groups for it says 'life is not fair but it is still good'. An optimistic and a happy-ending to the story is a cherry on the cake. Dickens has truly portrayed his classy and enticing writing skills.

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Book Review: Great Expectations

Although it was first published in 1861, this classic novel is still fresh and relevant in the 21st century. It is the story of a poor, rural, uneducated boy named Pip who meets and falls in love with a rich, beautiful, and cruel girl named Estella. Through the generosities of a mysterious benefactor, Pip is able to move to London and become a wealthy, eligible, gentleman. It seems that he may at last be worthy of Estella's love. If only it were so simple.

Filled some of the most famous characters in English literature, including several murderous convicts, a bizarre and sadistic woman who dresses only in a moldy wedding gown, a law clerk with a double life, and an exceptionally loyal best friend, this book is unforgettable. A commentary on the nature of social mobility as well as a coming-of-age novel, this story is equal parts mystery, romance, and legal drama, with enough plot twists to keep any reader turning pages (trust me -- I read it during finals week).

Most importantly, this book is a good choice for teenagers because it is relatable. It deals with finding yourself, searching for meaning in a seemingly meaningless world, coping with unrequited love, being financially responsible, finding good friends, spending your time and money on the right things, being appreciative and kind towards people who you may believe to be below your station, giving second chances, and the importance of staying close to your family even if you think that they are embarrassing, ignorant, or are not good enough for you.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. Even if you think that classics are boring or that historical fiction just isn't your thing, try Great Expectations. You won't regret it.

Reviewer Grade: 12

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Obama, More Than Dickens, Looms Over This ‘Great Expectations’

Vinson Cunningham’s impressive debut novel finds a watchful campaign aide measuring his ambitions on the trail of a magnetic presidential candidate.

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By Damon Young

Damon Young is a writer in residence at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays.”

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS, by Vinson Cunningham

As much as I pretend that I’m too conscientious, too emancipated, too Black and mostly just too lazy to succumb to a cult, the aesthetic choices I made in 2008 — when a distressed white tee featuring Shepard Fairey’s rendering of Barack Obama was an essential part of my wardrobe — remind me I ain’t that special. Still, I had company. “Great Expectations,” Vinson Cunningham’s brolic and dazzlingly written debut novel, transports us to that time, when America’s most valuable commodity was proximity — real or perceived; burgeoning or dimming — to the soon-to-be president.

Cunningham, a staff writer at The New Yorker who worked, in his 20s, on the Obama campaign and in his White House, ferries us through a year in the orbit of an Obama-like figure known to us only as the Senator and then the Candidate. (And let’s get this out of the way: “Obama-like” is a misnomer. This isn’t an interpretation, like Jeff Bridges’ Clintonesque Jackson Evans from “The Contender” or even the Clinton-adjacent Jed Bartlet on “The West Wing.” Dissimilarities between the fabricated Candidate and the flesh-and-blood Obama are nonexistent.)

And maybe “ferries” is the wrong word, too, because “Great Expectations” moves, in 249 quick pages, with propulsive energy, pausing the barnstorm to consume and deconstruct the sights along the way.

David Hammond is brilliant but rudderless, a college dropout and single dad thrust into the Candidate’s circle thanks to the elusive, shrewd and (increasingly, as the book continues) sexy Beverly Whitlock — a benefactor-slash-rabbi-slash-whoever-the-hell-she-wants-to-be, with one of those nebulous finance gigs where you’re never quite sure how they make all that money but always dead certain they wouldn’t hesitate to bury you with it. We’re quickly introduced to staffers and canvassers; to fund-raisers and their targets; to celebrity academics and scions of music moguls, all thirsty to be validated.

Cunningham captures the grind and the mundanity of the campaign with precision and humor, and via the incorporation of staff-specific shorthand. “Airplane rules,” David repeats to a crowd waiting in line to pass through the Apollo Theater’s metal detectors.

A supervisor later reminds him to look at the audience’s faces, and not the Candidate’s, at speaking engagements, to better know “which ones you could ask for a check.” Cunningham answers myriad questions I’ve always had, but never asked, such as “Where do young staffers sleep when stationed in new cities?” (Trailer parks, highway motels — anywhere with a cheap and friendly bed.) And: “How often do they hook up?” (Define “often.”)

The latter happens to David during a short but (non-saccharinely) sweet tryst with a fellow staffer in New Hampshire that generates a lucid exploration of the self-consciousness and messy neuroses some heterosexual men bring to sex. “The only real skill that’s portable from one person to the next is maybe openness,” David’s partner suggests to alleviate his anxiety about entering the bedroom without a rubric for guaranteed success.

The book especially floats when Cunningham — who, like David, is Black — explores the social lexicon of intra-racial hierarchy. Surrounding the Candidate — well, not quite always surrounding, but wishing to surround him — are the sort of Black people who use “summer” as a verb. The Martha’s Vineyard Blacks. The Hollywood-with-cocaine-connections Blacks. The big-money-Manhattan-Cobb-salad Blacks. All grasping (and paying) for the Candidate’s attention like a plover bird lurking around a crocodile’s mouth. And most of them the product of generations of passed brown paper bag tests.

It’s striking how none of these people even feign interest in the potential for America’s spiritual transformation that the Candidate’s messaging promises. No, that performance of interest in piety was for white people. (And, I guess, Black people with T-shirts.)

Embedded throughout the novel is David’s relationship to Christianity, and, just as frequent, Christianity’s relationship to him, often told through the Epistle-like back stories of his family and his church — a counterbalance to the messianic draw of the Candidate and the nakedly transactional soullessness of his wealthy flock.

While I appreciated the texture of these hermeneutics, each time Cunningham moved away from the urgent present of the campaign and David’s close but amorphous connection with Beverly, it lost momentum. Also, with autofiction that incorporates so many obvious allusions to famous people — and some actual real people are named here, too — why this instead of a memoir? It’s a curiosity I had, but a mid-novel change in a central relationship solved it for me.

Of course, a book entitled “Great Expectations” will draw comparisons between David Hammond and Dickens’s Pip . Yes, coming-of-age stories are familiar. From Malcolm Little to Forrest Gump, American literature is filled with common young men who find themselves, through chance and serendipity, immersed in the slippery world of choice and privilege.

Rarer is a debut that announces a talent like Cunningham’s. This is a writer who clearly loves Black people. But this affection is also a challenge. A charge to interrogate the social and spiritual cost of currency. And a reminder not to look at the Candidate’s face for answers.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS | By Vinson Cunningham | Hogarth | 249 pp. | $28

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An Obama campaign staffer stars in the shimmering autobiographical novel ‘Great Expectations’

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Book review

Great Expectations

By Vinson Cunningham Hogarth Press: 272 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

It’s ambitious to name your debut novel “Great Expectations.” Regardless of the immediate reference to Dickens’ classic coming-of-age novel, you’re establishing high stakes for yourself. That said, go bold or go home? New Yorker magazine staff writer and theater critic Vinson Cunningham takes that risk with his highly autobiographical and vividly rendered novel, “Great Expectations.”

After flunking out of college in Vermont, our narrator David is unmoored. In his early 20s, he’s lost the religion of his youth and has returned to his mother’s apartment “just south of Columbia University, in those blocks between 100th and 110th where the Upper West Side starts its soft melting into Morningside Heights.” He’s a young father, estranged from his daughter’s mother who also returned home from college to New York City. As David struggles to take classes at City University and hold down work as a tutor, his youthful potential feels like a memory. Despite all this, that shine is not entirely lost.

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At the book’s opening, David recalls: “I sat alone, hollering distance from the northern woods of Central Park, watching the Senator on TV.” He is watching the kickoff speech to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. While Cunningham never uses his name, it’s clear from both the broad strokes as well as the details that this is the future 44th president. “He spoke before the pillars of the Illinois statehouse, where, something like a century and a half earlier, Abraham Lincoln had performed the same ritual,” observes David. “The Senator brought his elegant wife and young daughters on stage when he made his entrance. A song by U2 played as they waved.”

It’s with this launch that Cunningham begins to show two individuals poised to begin a great journey. For a period of time, their paths will entwine. Both men face unbelievable odds, and both stick to a course that leads to the White House. The book shares this heady tension of aspiration, charisma, optimism, unbelievable timing and intellectual curiosity as well as a yearning for connection.

David may be lost, but he’s not forgotten. “Despite myself, and not without some reservations, I find that I do believe in luck, in flukes, in the meaningless harmony of certain sequences,” he observes. “Take the one whereby I landed on the Senator’s campaign, only a month or so after watching his big speech.” Beverly, who “had once appeared on the cover of Black Enterprise magazine” and was board member of his high school, “where people still vaguely remembered and liked me,” has hired him as a tutor for her teenage son, after hearing that he had “strayed from the path.” Quickly sensing that David was overqualified and understimulated, Beverly offers him an irresistible opportunity. The Senator’s campaign was looking for “anybody young and competent,” and with questions that serve more as statements, she lands him an interview with the campaign which quickly leads to a job with the fundraising committee.

This momentum steadily carries David through the book. Grounded in his thoughts, he’s a serious and considerate young man. His observations — of colleagues (“Everybody here dressed like a banker or a lawyer. I’d worn my boxy black suit with a slight shine at the elbows”), of donors (“I could tell this made him like me more. He’d helped make me”), of immigrants (“When I told him how much this guy has changed throughout his life, like walked him through how much effort this guy has put into himself — that’s what won him over”) — weave the story of a period of hope. In the wake of a campaign event introduction from Cornel West, David muses, not ironically, that “This candidacy was a rare instance of ‘radical love’ made real.” It’s funny to look back and say that 2007 was a simpler time, but 17 ragged years later, it’s easy to recognize that we live in a more cynical world. David’s journey brings us back to that moment through the encounters that maintained the campaign’s financial backbone.

And yet, what’s compelling is that David’s innocence is not spotless. His rush to adulthood (lost opportunities, early fatherhood) forced him to see difficult truths. At his tender age, he yearns for the simplicity of religion and the church songs he sang with his late father, whose death (“in a small hospital downtown, where nuns stood watch over the political deaths of plague victims”) was shrouded in silence. After his death “the world kept rushing on. On the night of his funeral, I wrote a song.” Is it no wonder this is a person in need of a hero?

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Gripped with this longing, Cunningham takes a cinematic, fast-paced story and infuses it with the texture of humanity. His ability to make art and find beauty in the smallest moments is the work of not just a skilled novelist but a soulful critic. Of Central Park, David muses, “It had always struck me as a place to be lost, experienced passage by passage, in a series of unfolding images — not something you could take in in one possessive glance.” Life, as well as fiction, is so often at its best when one surrenders to being lost. Though alchemy happens through an accumulation of details, life is lived in the moment.

However, such keen, intimate details raise questions of access and research. A cursory glance at Cunningham’s biography reveals that he also worked on the Obama campaign as well as for the administration. Beyond that, his life shares considerable overlap with David’s. Such proximity to history leads you to wonder why Cunningham didn’t choose to write a memoir.

But, again, there’s an expansiveness about fiction that elevates ideas and possibilities over a strict adherence to facts and truth. We could draw from our memories to resurrect a documentary-style recollection of the first Obama presidential campaign. Yet what surfaces from this novel is much more than the sum of its shimmering details, hence the benefit of working outside memoir. David echoes this reasoning, admitting: “I was less interested in the campaign’s plot than in how I was supposed to interpret it. Less in its details than in its coded total meaning.”

We too look at the coded total meaning that binds David to this journey. Cunningham’s attention to subtle, shared mysteries of life speaks more than a blow-by-blow analysis of this historical moment. The author cuts to the bone when David admits, “I wanted to be real in a way that history wasn’t, and realized, listening to the new president, that I didn’t yet know how, couldn’t fathom where to begin.” History is at its essence a collection of stories that speak to mythology, power and desire. When real life shifts into history, we lose a bit of ourselves. David — and Cunningham — explore the lives that coincide with history as Black men in America, as people endowed with faith, and as individuals who strive to surpass anyone’s wildest dreams.

Lauren LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.

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Great Expectations

Charles dickens.

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‘Great Expectations’ transports us to Obama’s first presidential bid

Vinson cunningham’s novel is a coming-of-age story that captures the soul of america.

In a political roman à clef, anonymity can leave a lot to be desired. When “ Primary Colors ” appeared in 1996, the rabid quest to identify its author ( Joe Klein ) outshone the novel’s sharp satire of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. In 2011, when someone — reportedly John McCain’s speechwriter Mark Salter — published “ O ,” about Barack Obama, anonymity was its most exciting element.

Vinson Cunningham, a former assistant in the Obama White House, subverts that sly mystery. “ Great Expectations ,” his boldly titled debut novel about a presidential campaign, proclaims Cunningham’s name but never names the candidate. Considering how specifically Obama is described in these pages, readers may find that omission cute, but it’s more than that. There’s a prevailing sense in “Great Expectations” that the eloquent Black politician from Illinois, “projecting an intimacy that was more astral than real,” is too indeterminate to be named. He’s a Rorschach test for America.

The first time “the Senator” appears in these pages — in 2007 during “a reception at a music producer’s apartment” — the room reorients itself around the candidate’s magnetism. Cunningham, a drama critic at the New Yorker, immediately demonstrates how attentive he is to the mannered theatricality of politics and particularly to Obama’s dramatic persona:

“His height was helped by an incredibly erect posture that looked almost practiced, the kind of talismanic maneuver meant to send forth subliminal messages about confidence and power. In the same way, and engendering the same effect, he held his chin at a high angle, aimed not directly ahead but at a point on the ceiling several yards ahead.”

This narrator, who wields talismanic maneuvers of his own, is David Hammond. He’s a bright young man who fathered a child and flunked out of college. After a year fumbling around in the wreckage of his great expectations, he began tutoring the son of a wealthy, politically connected woman, and by some fluke, that led to a job as a lowly fundraising assistant with the Senator’s presidential campaign. He quickly discovers he has a natural facility for soliciting donations from well-heeled Democrats.

The theme of money’s role in American politics may feel as fresh as a battered suitcase of unmarked bills, but the story of “diligently harvested cash” is merely background music for this novel. At 22, David is given entree to a world of rap stars, Wall Street bankers and high-society liberals who party in mansions on Park Avenue where the candidate’s appeal to common folk is debated with rising optimism.

What's the greatest political novel?

“Everything that happened in my life, good or bad, seemed to be an accident,” David says. “I’d somehow groped my way to the middle of the world. The middle of a world, at least. Or an unseen perch quite near the center, with an excellent view.”

But despite the novel’s steady drip of astute observations about Obama and his groundbreaking campaign, the excellent view David gives us is relentlessly introspective. He has a very personal reason to keep his eye on the people engineering the Senator’s victory: “I watched them closely,” he confesses, “searching for a way to be.”

How to be — or not to be — that is the question David mulls throughout this meditative novel that periodically checks in at well-known mile markers along Obama’s march toward the White House. In the context of this political revolution, that fixation on a lowly fundraising assistant could feel misplaced, even forced. Indeed, with an intensely ruminative protagonist — unmarried, without a degree, struggling to figure out how to be a father, jumping from one temporary career to another — “Great Expectations” risks sliding into the Audacity of Mope. But it’s wholly redeemed from that fate by how elegantly Cunningham explores the mind of this young Black man struggling to divine his role in a nation woven from money and faith.

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David may have failed his college classes, but he clearly did all the reading — even the supplementary reading that no one does. Listening to the Senator speak to a crowd of rich donors, he’s reminded of a character from Henry James’s “The Bostonians.” Watching the Senator walk briskly outside, he likens him to “Whitman over Brooklyn’s ‘ample hills.’” Allusions to Ralph Ellison, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dorothy West, Toni Morrison and others continually sprinkle down on these pages like holy water.

But no book is referenced here more frequently than the Bible. No other recent American novelist, except perhaps Marilynne Robinson, contends so diligently and so textually with the function of Christianity in the United States. Cunningham signals that engagement immediately when the novel opens with an analysis of the candidate’s sermonic oration. “The Senator had begun, even then, at the outset of his campaign,” David says, “to understand his supporters, however small their number at that point, as congregants, as members of a mystical body, their bonds invisible but real.” Without sounding ecclesiastical or like “some nationalist-imperialist pervert,” the Senator manages to reach back to the earliest manifestations of America’s spiritual mythology. “Despite his references, overt and otherwise, to Lincoln — and, more gingerly, to King — his closer resemblance was to John Winthrop making phrases on the ship Arbella , assuring his fellow travelers that the religion by whose light they’d left Europe in 1630 could cross spheres, from the personally salvific to the civic and concrete.”

David may have crossed from belief to unbelief, but as a young man raised in the fire of a Pentecostal church and educated by Jesuits, he still reads the world around him through the scrim of Scripture. You can hear that even in his grammar, the way he constantly interrupts himself, corrects himself, drills down again and again to some further explication.

This is the kind of novel — is there such a kind? — in which the subject of “the Bible’s hermeneutic density” is considered in some detail. Taking a ferry to a fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard, for instance, David slips effortlessly into a discussion of water in the Old Testament and the Gospels. His reflection on the story of Nicodemus questioning Jesus is delivered with the sort of intellectual depth, spiritual insight and sincere humility that could draw me back to church.

In David’s framing, the campaign is missionary work, the accommodations marked by “monkish austerity,” the rewards not of this world. Unshakable belief is an office requirement. The candidate is Christ; the fieldworkers John the Baptist. “We fundraisers,” David says, “trussed up our devotion in business attire, semi-terrestrial office hours, and a focus on numbers instead of individual hearts: so many high-church smells and bells, aimed not so secretly at assimilation into the wider culture toward whose transformation the effort was aimed.”

In a nation riven by theology, we’ve long been ill-served by literary fiction that remains locked in a reductive dichotomy of belief vs. doubt or, worse, simply pretends that religion doesn’t exist. Cunningham’s great accomplishment in this gracefully written novel is to demonstrate how the religious mind-set persists outside of parochial devotion, how the language of Scripture, the grammar of faith, shapes our experience even after the spirit seems to have left the body politic. The result is a coming-of-age story that not only captures the soul of America but also feels the unquenchable thirst for meaning which passeth all understanding.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

Great Expectations

By Vinson Cunningham

Hogarth. 257 pp. $27

Correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled the narrator’s last name. It is Hammond, not Hammons. This version has been corrected.

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'Great Expectations' Review: Charles Dickens' Classic Is Deftly Reborn in This Impressive Adaptation

Steven Knight takes on Charles Dickens with exceptional results.

Over 160 years after Charles Dickens penned, what is now hailed as his greatest work, Great Expectations , has found a new life in Steven Knight ’s smartly crafted limited series by the same name. Adaptations are no easy feat to pull off, especially not when there has been one (or two) nearly every decade for over a hundred years. After all, comparison is the thief of joy, and audiences will either find themselves comparing it to the novel or an adaptation that preceded it. Knight has managed to glean the most integral aspects from Dickens’ text, crafting over six hours of deeply engaging storytelling that rebuilds Great Expectations as something both new and distinctly familiar.

It may be difficult to see the potential in an orphan like Pip ( Tom Sweet ), whose future relies solely on his cruel and callous sister Sara Gargery ( Hayley Squires ) and her good-natured blacksmith husband Joe ( Owen McDonnell ). But therein lies the great expectations for his future, which are shaped by the deceptive machinations of Miss Havisham ( Olivia Colman ) — a woman clinging so desperately to her trauma that she haunts the halls of her own home, looking for her next victim. There is nothing truly good or pure about any character in Great Expectations , except perhaps Joe — whose steadfast belief in his nephew, despite his harsh transformation, is an anchor that tries to keep Pip tethered to the port. Likewise, Biddy’s kindness ( Laurie Ogden ) is like a lighthouse, guiding him back home, when Estella’s ( Shalom Brune-Franklin ) siren call might do him harm.

RELATED: 'Great Expectations': Release Date, Cast, Trailer, and Everything You Need to Know

Elevated from a lowly blacksmith’s boy to a gentleman, Pip ( Fionn Whitehead ) turns into the very thing he once detested, as he is forged into another weapon for Miss Havisham to wield against a society that did her wrong. Knight floods his adaptation with vivid, visceral images of water and flame — two forces that can give and destroy: always at odds. Whether these images come in the form of tumultuous seas, street-slicking rain, buildings ablaze, or tallow candles swaying in the wind, they always showcase the duality of man as an ever-evolving thing.

Pip’s life is entwined with a colorful array of personalities who are similarly entangled in the brambles of Miss Havisham’s cunning schemes. Jaggers ( Ashley Thomas ) is a powerful lawyer who acts as Pip's guide through the upper echelons of society, building on the lessons that Pip learned as a bright-eyed boy. Beneath the surface, Jaggers has his own secrets — ones that link him to the criminal underbelly that always lurks just beneath the surface of high society. Like the escaped convict Magwitch ( Johnny Harris ) who left an indelible mark on Pip as a young boy, out on the coastal marshes of Kent.

The limited series premieres with a pair of two episodes that swiftly navigate the audience through Pip’s early years, delivering them to the precipice of his rise to wealth and relative mediocrity. From there, the following four weeks see Pip’s life thrown into the chaos and gluttony associated with gentlemanhood, with each episode ending in a hook to drag audiences back for another dose of misery like grand ole masochists, similar to how the serialized form of Dickens’ work kept his readers returning week-to-week.

This adaptation of Great Expectations has been updated for a modern audience without truly sacrificing the historical context or the literary allusions that Dickens often employed. The largest area of improvement lies within the way that this series frames its female characters: they are not just pawns or angels of the hearth. Even Estella, who is forever and always a tool of Miss Havisham’s cruelty, is given more agency over her fate — breaking free of the chains that would have seen her abused for the benefit of others. Much in the same way, we don’t see other female characters beaten down for stepping outside of Victorian gender norms or whose abuse is used to torment the men in their lives. These changes, while some book purists may dither about, do not alter the intent of the story in any meaningful way beyond improving the enjoyment for audiences who dislike gratuitous violence against women.

For those who have studied Great Expectations to any extensive degree, you will find that some of the loftier concepts—particularly the compulsion to repeat—are significantly more understated. Those who haven’t read any supplemental analysis of Dickens’ work will likely miss the cyclical nature of Pip’s name, the deeper context of breaking Magwitch’s chains, and the visual and narrative symmetry between Miss Havisham and Estella.

Beyond the exceptionally well-crafted scripts — which could be talked about at great length, though it would spoil far too much — Great Expectations features some of the best historical costume designs of this decade. Oftentimes, particularly among streaming series, costuming appears to be an afterthought or a wild flight of fancy. With this series, Verity Hawkes ’ designs keep true to the fashions of Victorian England and seem keenly aware of the differences between upper, middle, and lower classes, while utilizing the full breadth of patterns, textures, decorations, and styles that were often on display during this period of transformative fashions. There is a great joy to be found in an adaptation that recognizes the beauty in hems altered by muddied wear, correctly tailored men’s trousers with perfectly styled fall fronts, and the necessity of pins to keep up aprons. Estella’s vast collection of dresses and hats is another highlight of Great Expectations , which helps to showcase the way Miss Havisham uses her like a doll to dress up and puppet. She is also often the only character to bring pops of color into Pip’s otherwise dreary existence.

Great Expectations finds a perfect balance in crafting a faithful adaptation while recognizing the necessity of change. The moral dilemmas, biting social commentary, and clever literary allusions are not lost to time, but time has provided new tools to see them explored through different lenses and different points of view. Whether this is someone’s first introduction to this piece of bildungsroman or the tenth adaptation they have consumed, they will find joy, sorrow, and beauty in what Steven Knight has constructed.

The first two episodes of Great Expectations will stream on Hulu on March 26, with new episodes released weekly every Sunday.

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GREAT EXPECTATIONS

by Vinson Cunningham ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2024

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?

Pub Date: March 12, 2024

ISBN: 9780593448236

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024

LITERARY FICTION

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by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.

This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9780385550369

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Percival Everett

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DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

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.

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

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Barbara Kingsolver

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