Contrapposto by Dave Eggers review: 'a moving and clever novel'
In Dave Eggers’ brilliant new novel, which tackles some big questions around the significance of art, there is a beautiful uncertainty about who’s right and who’s wrong, writes Stuart Kelly
It was 25 years ago that my first review was published in this newspaper, of the first work by an unknown American writer, Dave Eggers, with the snook-cocking title A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. And the title was actually true: it was heartbreaking, it was staggering (being postmodern and sincere is never easy) and it was the work of an exceptional talent. I was reminded of the chutzpah and bravado and sprezzatura of it when reading a line in his new novel – 20 years in the making, we are told – when an elderly artist informs his protégé “the talented have talent… the untalented have theories”.
Since then Eggers has written non-fictional novels – drawing on the life experiences of a Sudanese child soldier in What is The What and a man imprisoned unjustly during the Storm Katrina flooding in Zeitoun, a remarkable retelling of Maurice Sendak’s classic Where The Wild Things Are, his own children’s works - The Haggis-on-Whey World of Unbelievable Brilliance series – and novels examining the toxic, intrusive nature of our online world. Over and above all that he established the literary journal McSweeney’s - I still think issues #4-#6 are amongst the most beautiful and profound and adventurous artefacts of our age – and a website, “Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency” which was a joyous, kindly creation.
As a resumé, it is already remarkable. Now we have a new novel that encapsulates his virtues. Should Contrapposto be on prize shortlists? In a way, given the book is about the problems of aesthetic judgment, the only answer to this can be: from whose point of view?
The title refers to a very specific artistic term: “a position of the depicted human body (as in late Renaissance painting and sculpture) in which twisting of the vertical axis results in hips, shoulders, and head turned in different directions”, to give Merriam Webster’s definition. It is a novel about looking and gazing, about being the object of attention and the invisible viewer, about the utterly unabashed and the cripplingly emotionally stifled.
Plotwise, the book is panoramic in form. We are introduced to Rob, who later takes the name Cricket, and his grandfather – and Rob is drawing. His father is absent, his mother erratic and one day he meets Pia, revealed later to be called Olympia, who encourages him in a different kind of artistic venture: vandalism. The two will be intertwined from these teenage days until their seventies, in a glorious pas-de-deux of ambition, creation, desire, and most of all love, unrequited and ever-present. That we have an arc of their lives does not mean there are not losses – and serious ones. Eggers has always had a Janus capacity to be both wry and ironic and almost winsome and yet turning around on a ha’penny to speak truth unambiguously and unignorably.
Both Cricket and Olympia go to art school, and take very different directions. Cricket is a traditionalist, meticulous, even a neoclassicist, and a doomed perfectionist: he is basically a sort of Stanley Spencer crossed with Ken Currie. Olympia is the romantic obverse; a shaker-up, part Fluxus, part Christo, part Beuys, part Emin. In this dichotomy is the fulcrum of the novel: what is art worth? What you pay for it or what it means to you? I was reminded of two very different works while reading this. One was John Mortimer’s Rumpole story about the woman who bought a painting that turned out to be a fake: quoting Keats, he asked if she liked it because it was beautiful or valuable. The other was a novel I consider one of the most underrated of the previous century - The Recognitions by William Gaddis, about a talented painter (Wyatt Gwyon, son of a Calvinist minister) adrift in a pretentious society, who realises his true aptitude is for imitation.
In one of the best scenes, since this is a novel of ideas as well as a love story, Olympia and Cricket fight about money and art. She states: “Every painting you have ever seen exists because of wealthy people”. The elision here is done beautifully: “Cricket did not think that was strictly true but didn’t correct her.”
The reader never feels the author’s fingers nudging the scales. There is a beautiful uncertainty about who is actually right and who is sincere in their beliefs – and if I say that I underlined the parts where Cricket’s tutor rages against conceptual art, in a very funny way – well that says more about me. Especially since Olympia’s happenings actually have political power and significance.
There is a scene towards the end which I think telling. “Cricket imagined himself painting another one. All he could feel was obligation. The obligation to get it right. To make it as good as the first one… then packing it, sending it, waiting for the verdict. And reviews! What if there were reviews? All these atrocities”. A book review in a newspaper is directed to our readers, and I say wholeheartedly: read this moving, clever, fine novel. At the same time one is aware that the author might read this, or at least their publicist, to whom I say: thank you.
Contrapposto, by Dave Eggers, Canongate, £20
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