Dave Eggers, author of more than 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 show titled Lots of Things Like This, featuring pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Marcel Duchamp. He is soon to open Art + Water in San Francisco, a project combining an art school, affordable studios, exhibition galleries, and a community gathering space.
The Hero: Cricket Dibb
Cricket Dibb, the cloyingly named protagonist 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, beats his mother, calls her “a gimpy whore,” and steals any money she saves. Cricket hates him, especially 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, sees his drawing talent and tells him: “You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, order on your paper.”
The Muse: Olympia Argyros
Olympia Argyros sees something in Cricket. They bond after she gets him to write euphemisms for masturbation at a park playground and calls him her “partner-in-crime.” She is older, worldly, and self-confident. As a teenager, she has a musician boyfriend, access to money, reads DH 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 she is his destiny.
Artistic Struggles and Satire
Autodidacts and strivers – their sincerity, dreaming, gaucherie, and stumbles – typically make for comic and touching material. Cricket devours catalogues and art history books, from Dalí to Norman Rockwell. His studies of the Renaissance teach him pragmatic lessons (real artists don't wear glasses) and worrying ones (does he have a future if not apprenticed to a master by age 12?). Olympia champions exuberance, self-expression, and rule-flouting; he, by temperament and class, is drawn to accuracy and fidelity. He wonders if an artist may not be groundbreaking, but “just to get it right – wasn't that something in and of itself?”
These issues flare up at art college, where a skateboarder named Sharon is criticized for being a “skilled illustrator” with “all technique and no courage.” Scene after scene reads like hoary art-school satire. Callow youths who believe they are “interrogating” rather than painting face a maverick professor who declaims “Beauty needs no justification!”, “These kids don't know how to stretch a canvas,” and “The talented have talent. The untalented have theories.”
Comparisons and Criticisms
There are echoes of Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, an anti-biography of DH 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 has his academic 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, theorising, and being rigid.
Plot and Prose
Contrapposto spans decades and continents. Cricket's best friend, Jed, joins the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and is sent to Iraq. Olympia bounces around Sharjah, Madrid, and Greenland, racking up addictions and life-threatening illnesses. Art-world associates, painted with the broadest of brushstrokes like most characters, come to grisly ends. Cricket 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 in 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.
