CONTRAPPOSTO, by Dave Eggers
What a relief to be able to recommend the new Dave Eggers novel (almost!) without reservation. Eggers has in the past been testy about criticism. His Y2K injunction in The Harvard Advocate — “Do not dismiss a book until you have written one” — continues to ring reprovingly around the blogosphere. His own early reviewing, he said then, “came from a smelly and ignorant place in me.”
Pass the Febreze. Eggers’s “Contrapposto” is an earthy, warm return to form and norm — regular old fiction — after several ambitious but sterile exercises in parable, satire and the like.
The book takes its title from the off-center stance exemplified by Michelangelo’s “David,” and includes several drawings by the author and others. It is a bildungsroman and a novel of ideas, exploring the meaning of art and the unfairness, pretensions and occasional skulduggery of the art world. (A topic of unusual preoccupation for literary novelists of late.)
It’s also a romance of epic and goopy proportions that — in its depiction of generational churn, fundamentally impossible but important love, and sudden death — gave this reader weird brain shocks of “The Thorn Birds.”
Robert Dibb is known to all as Cricket, like the children’s magazine, an affectionate nickname bestowed by his grandfather because of the nervous clicking sound he makes. It also helps distinguish himself from his single mother’s horrible, physically abusive boyfriend, also named Robert.
Growing up somewhere in northwest Indiana, Cricket finds solace in making pictures (most of the drawings are supposed to be his), and one of his first successes, after his beloved grandfather dies, is a painting of a weasel with the adult Robert’s face, run over by a truck.
He imagines he’ll be summoned for an apprenticeship in Europe before realizing, at 16, “a charmed life was not to be his. He was not an exotic animal, a leopard, a cheetah. He was a rat, a raccoon — a common thing. And nothing would ever be given to him.”
By then he has been adopted, and perhaps toyed with, by a truly exotic animal: Pia, a golden-eyed, slightly older, classically “bad” girl from the neighborhood who encourages him to vandalize a new playground structure with euphemisms for masturbation, rendered in magic-markered calligraphy.
She smells of wet lemons, is annoyingly convinced she is the reincarnation of Albert Camus and has a laugh described way too many times as like a “thunderclap.” Pia turns out to be short for Olympia, last name Argyros — Greek for silver.
Worldly, self-assured and unstable, she’s a flawed goddess, a flighty Aphrodite; OK, a bit of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl: the latest in a long line of outrageous but inscrutable female characters like Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous,” Holly Golightly and a grown-up Pippi Longstocking.
Olympia comes on to the worshipful Cricket, at first with uninvited but welcome hand jobs, then later stages acrobatic sexual encounters involving showers and oceans, but is not really wifey material. “We’re not Ma and Pa Kettle,” she tells him after one encounter. “We’re supposed to be libertines.”
Most of the nakedness in “Contrapposto,” though, is unsexy; there are many set pieces about the awkward act of modeling unclothed. Across small but significant chronological leaps, we see the agonies of creation, self-exposure and deterioration.
“The crime is that we don’t know, most don’t know, how silken we remain, how sinewy and vital,” thinks one character in old age. To call the book “moving” would be a smelly cliché, so let’s say undulating, with both despair and hope.
Early on, Cricket notices the hidden details, the inside jokes, artists add for their own amusement. (As do novelists: “Don’t go to Frame of Mind,” Olympia advises for his first show. “Go to Ethan Frame.” Only in northwest Indiana, kids.)
He mulls “the role of sheer doggedness” over talent. Are artists just fancy craftspeople? Are craftspeople the real artists? Is copying one’s own greatest hits for profit, as Pollock and Warhol and Lichtenstein did, morally worse than counterfeiting masterpieces for “decorative fun”?
Is living well the only art of conscience? “I don’t think we need more things,” ventures a co-worker at the train station cafe who considers his lovemaking a higher calling.
The novel sneers audibly at the post-post-modern market, in which a banana taped to a wall goes for $6.2 million and patrons suffer through squiggles and too much negative capability. “You have been fed the lie that people enjoy looking at theories and gags and pranks,” a wise old professor thunders. “They do not.”
Eggers has over the years been as much curator as author, and not surprisingly some of the fictional exhibits in “Contrapposto” — like an installation on a floating barge called “Bedrooms of the Dead,” and a massive monument to members of the Norwegian Navy who fought Nazis at Narvik — sound like ones you’d actually want to see. Is there anything this children’s-book-writing, nonprofit-overseeing, magazine-founding Gen X-er can’t do?
Can he take a compliment? Can he take a well-earned summer vacation?
CONTRAPPOSTO | By Dave Eggers | Knopf | 432 pp. | $32
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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