Contrapposto review by Dave Eggers – This image by the artist falls | books

DEggers, the author of more than a dozen novels as well as a steady stream of children’s books and nonfiction, grew up wanting to be an artist. As a child, he took lessons with a Japanese watercolorist, studied drawing in college, worked as a cartoonist and magazine illustrator, and even curated a New York show called “So Many Things Like This” featuring pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Marcel Duchamp. He’s set to soon open a project in San Francisco that he’s been planning for a decade — Art + Water, a mix of art schools, affordable studios, galleries and a local gathering spot.

Cricket Dibb, hero of the deceptively named Contrapposto, would love a place like Art + Water. He’s a 10-year-old, working-class kid in the Midwest who passes raccoons and broken-down tractors on his way to school. His stepfather, Robert, thinks nothing of beating his mother, calling her a “limp bitch,” and stealing any money she saves. Cricket hates him not least for aesthetic reasons – his “ugly gold watch, his mouth full of black fillings, his bony bald head, his pockmarked face, and his little black eyes”. Cricket’s life is irregular, and his future is not promising. But his grandfather saw him drawing: “You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, and order on your paper.”

Another person who sees something in cricket is Olympia Argros. They hooked up after she made him write euphemisms for masturbating on a park playground, and she called him her “partner in crime.” She is older, worldly and confident. As a teenager, she had a musician boyfriend, had access to money, read D. H. Lawrence, hated Ayn Rand, and thought she was Albert Camus. She wonders why Cricket doesn’t run away with her to France. They should create a movement like the Neue Sachlichkeit – “that could arise from the dashed hopes of a blamed generation.” Maybe she’s crazy; He’s definitely crazy about her. The years go by, up and down: wherever he goes, they appear – a goad, a goad, a dispenser of hand jobs. Maybe his fate?

The studious and the self-educated – their sincerity and dreaminess, their frivolity and missteps – tend to provide comic and poignant material. From Dali to Norman Rockwell, Cricket devours any catalogs or art history books he can find. His Renaissance studies teach him both practical lessons (real artists don’t wear glasses) and troubling ones (does he have any future if he doesn’t apprentice to a master artist when he’s twelve?). Olympia stands for abundance, self-expression, and rule-breaking; By temperament and by class, he is attracted to precision and sincerity. The artist may not be a pioneer, but he wonders: “Just to do it right, wasn’t that something in itself?”

These kinds of issues break out again at the art college, where a skater named Sharon is criticized for being a “good painter” and “all the technique and no guts.” Scene after scene reads like old school art satire. Inactive youth (those who think they are “interrogating” rather than just painting) encounter a maverick professor who says “Beauty needs no justification!”, “These kids don’t know how to stretch a canvas,” “Gifted people have talent. Non-gifted people have theories.”

There are echoes here of Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s anti-biography of another working-class writer and artist, D. H. Lawrence, which included a delightful nude scene attacking academic criticism. (“Walk around a university campus and the smell of death is almost palpable because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.”) Dyer was deliberate and funny; Eggers—when he has his academics lament that professors are “forced to talk, which leads to statements, which leads to theories, and theories quickly become rigid and ridiculous”—seems to speak, theorize, and toughen.

Contraposto spans decades and continents. Jed, Cricket’s best friend, joins the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and is sent to serve in Iraq. Olympia moves around Sharjah, Madrid and Greenland, leading to addiction and life-threatening diseases. The art world accomplices, who are painted, like most of the novel’s characters, with the broadest brushstrokes, come to gruesome ends. Cricket himself is nearly killed in a ship’s boiler explosion off the coast of Türkiye and has a violent confrontation with a Parisian pier. At one point, he reflects on how he and Olympia “penetrated miles of interpersonal jungle and crawled over the broken glass of dozens of meandering romances, and were at last ready for the glorious peace and undoubted love they could give each other. But she wanted more broken glass.”

It is difficult not to compare such passages – unfavorably – with those we find in the pages of the People’s Friend issue. Or read a shower sex scene (“The water hit his shoulders, swept over her stomach, pooled where their pelvises met, and as she sped up the water a spark caught and he jumped and died a hundred times”) without sighing that the prize for bad sex in fiction has ceased. “You have been fed the lie that explaining your ideas is the same as achieving them,” declares my favorite cricket professor. Contraposto falls in love with a lie, whether pious or severe.