Dave Eggers’s new novel, Contrapposto, transmits a deep understanding of the impulse to make art—to study, practice, commit to making art on a regular basis, to exhibit and sell your work (or your skills), collaborate with others in the art world, to make its mysteries and practicalities your life. Cricket and Olympia first meet in grade school in a northwest Indiana prairie town. Cricket is drawing two-headed dragons and spaceships, discovering Manet; Olympia is luring him into using his calligraphic skills to deface a playground with vulgar language. So the story begins.
These entwined friends navigate the world for some sixty-five years, reconnecting at the Indiana public university where they study art (and Cricket rebels against the faculty trends); Chicago, where Olympia rescues Cricket from an internship at an art gallery she calls “a hermetically sealed inversion of all that makes life and art worthwhile,” Aliya, the coastal Turkish town where Cricket is scavenging old cruise ships for several years before Olympia tracks him down and lures him into joining her into working for their university art school classmate Kyle Heaney, whose art employs dozens of workers (“…everyone involved….they were all engaged in a kind of factory that made beautiful. unnecessary things that meant very little to anyone who made them”); Phuket, where Cricket makes copies of iconic paintings like Guernica for a shop that includes Kahlo T-shirts and Haring towels…
