Dave Eggers, author of over a dozen novels and numerous children's and nonfiction books, grew up aspiring to be an artist. He took lessons with a Japanese watercolourist as a child, studied painting in college, worked as a magazine cartoonist and illustrator, and even curated a New York exhibition titled 'Lots of Things Like This' featuring works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Marcel Duchamp. He is soon to open a project in San Francisco that he has been developing for a decade: Art + Water, a combination of art school, affordable studios, exhibition galleries, and a local gathering place.
The Protagonist: Cricket Dibb
Cricket Dibb, the cloyingly named hero of Contrapposto, would love a place like Art + Water. He is a 10-year-old working-class midwestern kid who passes raccoons and broken tractors on his way to school. His stepfather, Robert, thinks nothing of beating his mother, calling her 'a gimpy whore,' and stealing any money she saves. Cricket hates him, not least on aesthetic grounds—'his ugly gold watch, his mouth full of black fillings, his bony bald head, his pockmarked face, his tiny black eyes.' Cricket's life is erratic, his future unpromising. His grandfather, however, spots him drawing and says: 'You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, order on your paper.'
The Bond with Olympia Argyros
Someone else who sees something in Cricket is Olympia Argyros. They bond after she gets him to write euphemisms for masturbation at a park playground and calls him her 'partner-in-crime.' She is a bit older, worldly, and self-confident. As a teenager, she has a musician boyfriend, access to money, reads D.H. Lawrence, hates Ayn Rand, and thinks she is Albert Camus. She asks why Cricket doesn't escape with her to France, suggesting they create a movement like the Neue Sachlichkeit—'it could arise from the shattered hopes of a maligned generation.' She may be crazy; he is certainly crazy about her. Years pass with ups and downs: wherever he goes, she shows up—a goad, an egger-on, a dispenser of handjobs. Perhaps his destiny?
Artistic Themes and Satire
Autodidacts and strivers—their sincerity and dreaming, their gaucherie and stumbles—tend to make for comic and touching material. From Dalí to Norman Rockwell, Cricket devours any catalogues or art history books he can find. His studies of the Renaissance teach him lessons both pragmatic (real artists don't wear glasses) and worrying (does he have any future if he's not apprenticed to a master artist by the time he's 12?). Olympia champions exuberance, self-expression, and rule-flouting; he, by temperament and (Eggers suggests) by class, is drawn to accuracy and fidelity. An artist may not be groundbreaking but, he wonders, 'just to get it right—wasn't that something in and of itself?'
These types of issues flare up again at art college, where a skateboarder named Sharon is criticized for being a 'skilled illustrator' and 'all technique and no courage.' Scene after scene reads like hoary art-school satire. Callow youths (those who believe they are 'interrogating' rather than merely painting) come up against a maverick professor who declaims 'Beauty needs no justification!', 'These kids don't know how to stretch a canvas', 'The talented have talent. The untalented have theories.'
Comparisons and Criticisms
There are echoes here of Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer's anti-biography of another working-class writer-artist, D.H. Lawrence, which featured a gleefully narked setpiece attacking academic criticism. ('Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.') Dyer was wilfully over-the-top and funny; Eggers—when he gets his academic to lament that professors are 'forced to talk, which leads to pronouncements, which leads to theories, and theories become rigid and quickly ridiculous'—merely sounds as if he is pronouncing, theorizing, being rigid.
Plot and Character Development
Contrapposto spans decades and continents. Cricket's best friend, Jed, joins the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and is sent to serve in Iraq. Olympia bounces around Sharjah, Madrid, and Greenland, racking up addictions and life-threatening illnesses. Art-world associates, painted, like most of the novel's characters, with the broadest of brushstrokes, come to grisly ends. Cricket himself is nearly killed in a ship-boiler explosion off the coast of Turkey and has a violent encounter with a Parisian pavement. At one stage he reflects on how he and Olympia have 'hacked through miles of interpersonal jungles and crawled over the broken glass of a dozen tortuous romances and were finally ready for the glorious calm and doubtless love they could give one another. But she wanted more broken glass.'
It is hard not to compare such passages—unfavourably—with those found in an issue of The People's Friend. Or to read a lovemaking scene set in a shower ('The water tapped his shoulders, swept down her tummy, pooled where their pelvises met, and as she sped up the water sparked and leapt and he died a hundred times') without sighing that the Literary Review's bad sex in fiction award has been discontinued. Cricket's favourite professor declares, 'You have been fed the lie that explaining your ideas is the same as realising them.' Both pious and shrill, Contrapposto falls for the lie.
