“I cannot in my wildest fantasies see myself making it past fifty or fifty-five,” wrote Dave Eggers in his first book, 2000’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. This March, he turned fifty-six. In that memoir, he made use of his family’s dramatic story—the sudden death of both of his parents during his early twenties and Egger’s subsequent experience raising his younger brother. But in later collaborative work, he took on the stories of others. Zeitoun told the story of a Syrian immigrant in New Orleans who paddled around in a canoe helping neighbors in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. What Is the What concerned a Sudanese refugee separated from his family during the country’s second civil war. Much of Eggers’s most important and lasting work has been as a founder and editor of magazines—most notably McSweeney’s and The Believer, which he helped create with his wife, the writer Vendela Vida (together they also wrote the film Away We Go).
In many ways, Eggers’s latest novel, Contrapposto, is the meditation of an older, successful artist on what his life might have been if he had been unable—or simply refused—to work and collaborate successfully. The new novel is not a collaboration itself, nor is it experimental. It is neither genre-bending nor socially or politically urgent. The ideas it’s concerned with, about art and people, could have been raised in any book during the relatively brief history of the novel. It is an old-fashioned Dickensian book down to the name of its protagonist: Cricket Dibbs.
In Cricket, the author seems to be asking himself, what if I had been just a little bit less driven, just a little bit lazier, a little worse at collaborating? Without spoiling anything, he doesn’t seem to imagine the results to be especially bad. His failed artist is not tortured or wrought with depression; he works and teaches, even collaboratively, and he’s content with the creativity of others. He just doesn’t produce. An artist content not to make art may not seem a promising premise, but Eggers whips up enough chaos around Cricket that his agreeableness works as a counterbalance.
In the prairies of suburban Indiana, Cricket is brought up roughly by his mother and her erratic boyfriend, Robert. Art is his only solace. His grandfather tells him, “You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, order on your paper.” Uncultured, uneducated, lower-middle class, Cricket dreams of being summoned for an apprenticeship. It’s a classic Harry Potter fantasy: “He would get a letter, possibly on parchment, from Paris or Antwerp or Venice.” But Cricket is no Harry Potter. He isn’t the chosen one, the great genius. He is resourceful without being strategic, talented without being visionary. He’s gifted technically but nothing more.
Olympia is the complete opposite. Cricket’s friend, muse, and sometime lover, she’s stuck in Indiana, too, but has East Coast ties, urbane ideas, and street knowledge. The only thing she doesn’t have is Cricket’s technical skill. “The truth is I don’t have a very steady hand,” she tells him as a teenager. “I will probably end up being a curator or ringleader.” But her knowledge, for a teenager, is immense: “Every minute, she uttered a name he didn’t know, a place he’d never heard of.” She tells Cricket about Camus, Tolstoy, and Zola. Bravely, he attempts to read Camus’s notebooks. The ideas mean nothing to him; that they could be meaningfully tied to the concrete, representational work of painting never crosses his mind. To Cricket, Olympia’s knowledge is something mystical, ungraspable, as though “she was some grand immortal soul temporarily living within the body of an Indiana sixteen-year-old.” He’s yin, she’s yang. They should complete each other, and yet they don’t.
Contrapposto is full of genuinely insightful intellectual discussion that arises from the young couple’s dynamic. They both enlist in an art program at Indiana University, where, in one particularly sharp scene, two pieces are critiqued. The first is a polaroid photo of a Richard Prince photograph, itself derived from a Marlboro ad. A professor praises this photograph of a photograph of a photograph for its “flatness and blandness” and “pure execution of concept.” The other, a large-format, detailed painting of a modern urban crucifixion, is derided, “all technique and no courage.” “It’s a Norman Rockwell picture that pretends to be about something more,” says another professor. “It’s the cover of a sci-fi magazine.”
But then comes the rejoinder from the older and semiretired Professor Carpenter: “I see before me a pack of jackals devouring a lion… The art world, in the last century, has made room for those who cannot draw. But I would ask that you, that we, resist a new, paradoxical tyranny wherein those without technical skill terrorize those who possess it.” He continues, “You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement.” “You have been fed the lie that people enjoy looking at theories and gags and pranks.” “The talented have talent,” he closes. “The untalented have theories.” His monologue persuades both Cricket and Olympia. Between them, the greatest possible insult to an artist becomes, “I bet he explains his work well.”
The antithesis of the gimmick polaroid—and the wall-text it depends on for meaning—is life-drawing. Throughout the book, including in illustrations, that is the form taken most seriously; it’s the old-fashioned tradition of quality, the opera of the art world. Needless to say, it has been banned by the postmodern bozos at the university. Cricket receives his instruction instead in community classes, then later at ornery Professor Carpenter’s home. He teaches Cricket how to turn a canvas to check for balance: “A great composition will still work upside-down.” He explains to him that “wet-on-wet is the best way to get true flesh tones.” He trains him to “use linseed oil to thin his paint, and to never use turpentine.”
These teaching moments, including some at the Chicago Institute of Art—where Cricket learns to use a thumb to generate perspective, paint with quadrants, and to see an eye-worth of space between the subject’s eyes—are some of the book’s most interesting, especially for non-artists who may imagine painters as more divinely gifted than fanatically precise. Again and again, Eggers takes pains to demonstrate the value of technique and skill in painting—to show that there is a level of intimate knowledge and way of seeing that those who obsess over theory and curation will never access.
But then he makes the opposite case. “Six hundred years ago, the kind of drawing and painting you can do, Cricket, would have been enough. People would consider you one of the most talented draftsmen walking the earth,” says Professor Carpenter. “But it’s not enough. You have to marry that to some idea. Something more.” Cricket, as he attempts to carve out a career as an artist, can never think of anything except to paint whatever’s right in front of him: the first model who shows up to his call for models, his friend who just died, the clouds above his head. The works are always technically proficient but they’re too obvious to be anything more. As his mentors tells him: “You can have all the skill in the world, but without an idea—something that delights or challenges the mind—it probably falls short of being art.” Cricket, ultimately, isn’t an artist.
What’s curious about the book, and what keeps it from banality, is the way Eggers wrongfoots us. He chooses not to let Olympia complete Cricket by supplementing what he lacks. In their early days, she instructs him to do graffiti, and, later, curates a disastrous nude painting show at the local public library. That’s followed by more successful art shows in college and eventually a position for Cricket working in the studio of a high-society hack artist. Olympia tries and tries again to bring Cricket artistic success, but she always comes up short. She can’t give him her vision; he can’t give her his skill. The perfect exchange is desperately close but devastatingly out of reach. They’re a duo and they’re artistic, but they’re never an effective artistic duo. Art brings them together only to drive them apart.
Contrapposto, the resting of the body’s weight on one leg so that the shoulders and hips tilt in opposite directions, is a common technique in sculpture and figure drawing. Michelangelo’s David is the classic example—it gives a sense of a living, moving body, instead of a perfect, frozen figure. Eggers’s title seems to suggest that Olympia and Cricket’s opposition could create beauty, but also that those poses may be fraught, unsustainable, tiring. What works in art may not work in life.
Cricket is a slow, plodding craftsman—as content to lay tile or paint road signs as to attempt a more personal project. He likes “meditative work, menial labor that [allows] the mind to wander.” Olympia is in a nonstop race to accomplish the most important thing and do it the fastest. “You need something to have happened before thirty,” she tells Cricket. “Otherwise you’re late and worthless and all is lost.” He never fully understands why she cares so much about selling paintings or starting movements, nor why she’s not content to settle down with him. After one of their many fleeting liaisons, Eggers writes in a striking passage:
A few minutes earlier, he’d thought that they had, separately, 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 that they could give one another. But she wanted more broken glass.
It’s not just talent and vision that make an artist but drive, to the point of constant self-destruction. And Cricket doesn’t have that kind of need. He’s not especially outward facing, as his grandfather says: “Chaos outside, order on your paper.” If, for some reason, he’d needed to prove something much bigger to the world, perhaps Cricket and Olympia would have worked better together and suited each other romantically. “You could have done much more,” says Olympia. “Well, I didn’t,” says Cricket.
Eggers has done a great deal, of course, but perhaps with this character, he is acknowledging a certain lack—a need to work with others to supplement his technical ability, provide an impetus, pull him outside of himself. Where Cricket shrinks away, of course, Eggers has consistently sought out collaboration. Perhaps it has come at the cost of developing the singular voice often associated with great writers. He’s a chameleon and a collaborator, not an immediately knowable brand like Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith. Nevertheless, he seems to have struck the right balance.
Contrapposto
A Novel
Dave Eggers
Knopf
$32 | 432 pp.
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