DAve Eggers, author of more than a dozen novels as well as children’s and non-fiction books, wanted to be an artist when she grew up. As a child he took lessons with a Japanese watercolorist, studied painting in college, worked as a magazine cartoonist and illustrator, even directed a New York show featuring works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Marcel Duchamp titled Lots of Things Like These. He will soon be opening a project in San Francisco that he has been working on for a decade – a hybrid of art + water, art school, affordable studios, exhibition galleries and local gathering place.
Cricket Dib, the cleverly named hero of Contrapposto, will love a place like Art + Water. He is 10 years old, a working-class Midwestern kid who passes raccoons and broken down tractors on his way to school. Her stepfather, Robert, thinks nothing of beating her mother, calling her a “gimpy whore”, and stealing all the money she has saved. Cricket hates her, at least on aesthetic grounds – “her ugly gold watch, her mouth full of black fillings, her bony bald head, her worn-out face, her small black eyes”. Cricket’s life is irregular, its future bleak. However, his grandfather sees him drawing: “You can create beauty from scratch in your notebook. And harmony. Chaos out, order on your paper.”
Someone else who watches something in cricket is Olympia Argyros. When she gets him to write down euphemisms for masturbation in the park playground, and calls him her “partner in crime”, they bond. She’s a little older, worldly and self-confident. As a teenager, she has a musician boyfriend, access to money, reads DH Lawrence, hates Ayn Rand, thinks he’s Albert Camus. She asks, why doesn’t Cricket run away with her to France? They should create a movement like the Neue Sachlichkeit – “that could arise from the broken hopes of a disgraced generation”. She may be crazy; He’s definitely crazy about her. Years passed, there were ups and downs: wherever he went, she appeared – an instigator, an instigator, a giver of handjobs. Maybe his destiny?
Autodidacts and strivers – their honesty and dreaming, their trickery and bumbling – make for humorous and poignant material. From Dali to Norman Rockwell, Cricket devours whatever catalogs or art history books he can find. His study of the Renaissance taught him lessons both practical (real artists didn’t wear glasses) and worrying (would he have any future if he didn’t train with a master artist by the age of 12?). Olympia champions enthusiasm, self-expression, rule-breaking; He is, by nature and (Eggers suggests) by class, attracted to accuracy and fidelity. An artist may not be groundbreaking, but, he wonders, “just to get it right – wasn’t that something in itself?”
These types of issues flare up again at art college, where a skateboarder named Sharon is criticized for being a “skilled painter” and “all technique and no courage”. Scene after scene feels like old art-school satire. The callow youth (who believe they are “inquiring” rather than simply painting) come up against a temperamental professor who claims “Beauty needs no justification!”, “These kids don’t know how to stretch a canvas”, “The talented have talent. The talentless have principles.”
Here there are echoes of Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s anti-biography of another working-class writer-artist, DH Lawrence, featuring a gleefully presented setpiece attacking academic criticism. (“Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place as hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.”) Dyer was deliberately OTT and funny; Eggers – when he calls on his academics to lament that professors are “forced to talk, which leads to pronouncements, which leads to theories, and theories become rigid and quickly ridiculous” – only sounds as if he is pronouncing, theorizing, being rigid.
Contrapposto spans decades and continents. Cricket’s best friend, Jade, joins the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and is sent to serve in Iraq. Olympia is fueling addictions and life-threatening diseases in Sharjah, Madrid and around Greenland. Like most of the characters in the novel, painted with broad brushstrokes by art-world associates, he comes to a terrible end. Cricket herself is nearly killed in a ship-boiler explosion off the coast of Türkiye and has a violent encounter with a Parisian sidewalker. At one stage he reflects on how he and Olympia “traced miles of interpersonal forests and crawled over the broken glass of a dozen tortured romances and were finally ready for the glorious peace and selfless love they could give each other. But she wanted more broken glass.”
It is not difficult to compare such passages – unfavourably – with those found in the pages of any issue of The People’s Friend. Or to read a love-making scene set in the shower (“The water splashed her shoulders, flowed down her stomach, pooled where their pelvises met, and as she raised the water she sprang up and jumped and he died a hundred times”) without saying that the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction award has been given up. Cricket’s favorite professor declared, “You have been fed the lie that explaining your ideas is the same as realizing them.” Both solemn and sharp, Contrapposto gets caught in a web of lies.
