Dave Eggers returns to fiction with Contrapposto, a novel that traces the lifelong friendship between two working-class Midwestern art-world mavericks.
Unfortunately, the book ends up as a disappointingly pious portrait of an artist.
Plot and Characters
The story centers on Cricket Dibb, a 10-year-old boy from a troubled home who finds solace in drawing.
His life changes when he meets Olympia Argyros, an older and self-confident partner who pushes him toward radical creative movements.
While Cricket seeks accuracy in his work, Olympia champions rule-flouting and raw exuberance. This philosophical tension follows them over decades.
The narrative spans continents and decades, covering art college dynamics that often read like hoary satire. Eggers populates the book with broad, thinly sketched characters.
Cricket survives a near-fatal boiler explosion off Turkey and a violent incident in Paris, while his friend Jed is deployed to Iraq.
Despite the grand scale, the prose frequently stumbles, especially in melodramatic love scenes and forced philosophical musings on art.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The novel has an intriguing initial premise exploring the sincerity and stumbles of working-class autodidacts. Its ambitious narrative scope spans multiple decades and international settings.
However, the narrative tone is overly pious and shrill, failing to realize its conceptual ideas effectively. Art-school satire scenes feel tired and clichéd.
Characters are drawn with excessively broad brushstrokes, lacking depth. The melodramatic prose and weak dialogue, particularly in romantic sequences, further detract from the reading experience.
Contrapposto attempts to dissect the intersection of class, technique, and creative philosophy through a lifelong companionship.
But by explaining its ideas rather than fully realizing them, the book becomes rigid and dry.
This novel is best suited for dedicated completists of Eggers' bibliography rather than readers looking for a nuanced or moving portrait of the contemporary art world.
