Contrapposto review by Dave Eggers – this photo of the artist falls under | Books

Dave Eggers, the author of more than a dozen books and a steady stream of children’s books and non-fiction, grew up wanting to be an artist. As a child he studied with a Japanese watercolor artist, studied painting in college, worked as a photographer and illustrator in New York, even curated a New York exhibition called Lots of Things Duquiat by Jean-Michel. He recently opened a project in San Francisco that he has been breaking for ten years – Art + Water, a school that combines art, affordable studios, galleries and gathering spaces.

Cricket Dibb, a legendary Contrapposto champion, would love a place like Art + Water. He is 10 years old, he is the child of an afternoon worker and he goes to school. Her stepfather, Robert, doesn’t think he can beat her mother, calling her a “stupid whore”, robbing her of any money she has saved. Cricket hates him, mostly for cosmetic reasons – “his ugly gold watch, his mouth with black fillings, his bald head, his pockmarked face, his black eyes”. Cricket’s life is in shambles, his future is bleak. However, his grandfather sees him drawing: “You can bring out the beauty in your books from the beginning, with harmony.

Someone who sees something in Cricket is Olympia Argyros. They hook up after he gets her to write about masturbating in a playground, calling him her “partner-in-crime”. He is about being mature, worldly and confident. As a teenager, he has a musical girlfriend, earns money, reads DH Lawrence, hates Ayn Rand, thinks he is Albert Camus. Why doesn’t Cricket run away to France with him, he asks. They should create a movement like Neue Sachlichkeit – “it can come from the broken hopes of a bad generation”. He may be mad; of course he is crazy about her. Many years pass, ups and downs: wherever he goes, he appears – a guide, a shooter, a manual worker. Maybe his future?

Autodidacts and strivers – their sincerity and dreams, gaucherie and stumbling blocks – like to create funny and effective things. From Dalí to Norman Rockwell, Cricket gets every reference or history book he can find. His Renaissance education teaches him pragmatic lessons (real artists don’t wear glasses) and anxiety (does he have a future if he hasn’t learned art by the time he’s 12?). Olympia wins to have fun, to show off, to break the rules; he, by temper and (Eggers suggests) and class, is attracted to accuracy and integrity. An artist may not be happy but, he wonders, “just fixing – wasn’t it something else?”

This type of story also begins at an art college, where a figure skater named Sharon is criticized for being a “talented artist” and “all manners and courage”. Scene after scene feels like an art school comedy. Callow’s youth (who believe they are “asking questions” rather than taking pictures) challenge an art professor who says “Beauty needs no justification!”, “These kids don’t know how to stretch a canvas,” “Artists have art. Artless people have ideas.”

There are some comments here for Out of Sheer Rage, a critique of Geoff Dyer’s biography of a working-class writer, DH Lawrence, who presented a scantily clad portrait that defied academic criticism. (“Walk around a university campus and there is a distinct smell of death around the place as hundreds of students are busy killing everything they touch.”) Dyer was deliberately OTT and funny; Eggers – when he gets his studies to complain that professors “are forced to talk, which leads to rhetoric, which leads to ideas, and ideas become mature and stupid quickly” – he just sounds like he is talking, explaining, being mature.

Contrapposto spans many years and continents. Cricket’s best friend, Jed, joins the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and is sent to serve in Iraq. Olympia skips around Sharjah and Madrid and Greenland, developing habits and dangerous diseases. Art-world collaborators, painters, like most of the characters in the book, with very large brushstrokes, come to the end. Cricket himself is almost killed in a boiler explosion at sea off the coast of Turkey and is confronted with violence by the street of Paris. At one point, he reflects on how he and Olympia “passed through the densely populated forests and crawled through the broken glass of a dozen loves and were finally ready for the quiet and glorious love they would share.”

It is difficult to compare such passages – negatively – with those found in the pages of The People’s Friend. Or to read the love scenes set in the shower (“The water hit her shoulders, swept her stomach, they joined where their hips met, and as they chased the water came out and jumped and died a hundred times”) without worrying that the Literary Review’s bad sex in the fiction award is over. A cricket-loving professor said, “You’ve been fed the lie that expressing your thoughts is the same as knowing them.” Both pious and angry, Contrapposto falls for a lie.