Contrapposto: A Novel

by Dave Eggers

Cricket is just a shy kid who likes drawing when he first meets Olympia. She's older, more confident; she bullies him into some light vandalism and instantly he's in love. When they're together, they talk about their futures, how they're going to travel the world, the beauty and rapture of art.

Then those futures start to arrive in unexpected ways, the years and decades pile up between them, the art world seduces and disappoints and frustrates them. And they have to figure out, again and again, what it is to be an artist, and who and what to love.

This is a wild and beautiful novel about two friends who believe they can change the world, if only they can start their own movement, dodge charlatans, remain open-eyed and open-hearted, avoid going mad, avoid dying young of rare cancers, stay true to their ideals and never tire of beauty. Not easy, but not impossible, either.

Genres: Fiction, Art, Literary Fiction, Friendship, Adult Fiction, American, Novels

592 pages, Paperback

First published June 9, 2026

About the author

Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is best known for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Eggers is also the founder of several notable literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness. Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A story of life, love, and art.
Robert (Cricket) Dib comes from a home of a single mother (with an abusive boyfriend) spends most of his time drawing.
He meets Olympia when he is nine years old and she is 10, she is a brilliant and worldly girl and he falls for her immediately.
When they are older they go to art school together.
They end up being entwined in a sixty five year relationship of friendship, working partnership, and a love affair.
Olympia never stays put, always on to a new venture or another man ..but Cricket is always there for her when she returns.
Both of their lives revolve around art.. though Cricket’s is really just the joy of drawing and painting and Olympia has big ideas and always wants Cricket to strive for bigger success.
We are taken around the globe as they move in and out of each other’s lives …New York, Thailand, Paris and learn a lot about how the art world works.
This was a beautiful story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the free ebook in exchange for an honest review.

[Bam cooks the books · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Nothing is true except the beautiful.' And this is an engaging and beautiful story about art, life, and love. It is a character-driven novel about a man named Robert 'Cricket' Dibb, a gifted artist, and follows the story of his life from boyhood into his 70s. Cricket grew up in Northwest Indiana with a single mother who says he could draw before he could walk. At nine, a slightly older girl named Olympia talks him into defacing a new playground with his artwork and from that point on, he remains under her spell.

The theme of the story is of course about art and the creative process. What differentiates art from craft? Where is the best place to learn technique? Who decides what's good art? Let's begin with a definition of the title, Contrapposto.

"Contrapposto is an Italian term translating to 'counterpose.' It describes a natural, relaxed pose in which a human figure’s weight shifts onto one foot. This shift causes the shoulders and hips to tilt in opposite directions, creating a gentle, dynamic S-curve along the spine."

'A natural, relaxed pose.' I was thinking how much that describes Cricket's reaction to his life's experiences over the years. He tends to remain calm and roll with the punches, whereas his friend Olympia goes ballistic on his behalf. At 15, he takes some classes in drawing figures at the Art Academy in Chicago. He dreams of being 'discovered' and asked to study in Paris. But the first showing of his work at his local library is taken down for being too 'realistic' (read here NUDES)--there were complaints.

At college, he watches a talented artist have her work eviscerated by her professors and fellow students at a group crit session but a 'mostly' retired professor named Marcus Carpenter stands up to defend her work, saying '...before an artist attacks another artist, they must vanquish all evil on Earth.' Carpenter becomes a mentor, even a father of sorts, for Cricket and his friends.

And always Olympia steps in and out of Cricket's life. She is a free spirit who urges him on to greater things but can often lead him astray with her crazy ideas. They love each other but there's the feeling that Cricket is not enough for her--she has to keep moving on to the next thing, the next man. But he's always there when she needs help or a soft place to fall.

I started to write about a favorite part of the story but then realized there are really too many to bring up in this review. I just thoroughly enjoyed the story and the characters. I loved the descriptions of people and setting through the artist's eyes and was happy to see a few of his drawings included in the ebook format. From what I've heard, these are the author's, but my arc does not include the actual artwork credits.

Many thanks to the author and publisher for providing me with an arc via NetGalley.

[Michael Burke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finding Balance: The Art and Heart of “Contrapposto”

Dave Eggers’ “Contrapposto” is a remarkable achievement that grounds its critical examination of art, commerce, and creativity within a deeply moving story of lifelong friendship. True to its title—which refers to the off-center stance in classical art where a figure balances weight on one leg—the novel succeeds by maintaining a perfect balance between its heavy thematic weight and the intimate, human story of Cricket and Olympia.

Eggers does not shy away from the darker side of the creative industry, providing a sharp critique of the contemporary art world’s pretension and its relentless pressure to prioritize marketable novelty over genuine craftsmanship. Yet, this exploration never distances the reader from the narrative’s heart. The true strength of the book lies in how vividly Eggers fleshes out Cricket and Olympia over their six-decade journey. Olympia acts as a constant catalyst, her dynamic and unpredictable persona serving as the primary spark for Cricket’s career development. Her persona—highlighted by her self-proclaimed reincarnation of Albert Camus—makes her a fascinating, flawed figure.

As they age, Cricket and Olympia become deeply endearing. The book explores whether an artist can remain true to their ideals in a world that values fads over flash, but it ultimately keeps the focus firmly on two friends trying to find meaning in their work and each other, ensuring that the critique of the art world serves the characters rather than replacing them.

Thank you to the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #Contrapposto #NetGalley

It’s not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art the makes us struggle – Albert Camus

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loved the discussions about art, but something got lost in its episodic structure. The second half had little impact on me.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel follows Cricket from boyhood to age seventy through a long series of art experiences. At age nine, he knows he has artistic talent, but he lives with a single mother who cannot nurture his gift. The one constant in his life is Olympia, two years older, who enjoys his company but uses him for her own purposes. Olympia has access to money and a feel for the international art scene. Cricket has neither. He is happiest sketching and producing art for its own sake. Trying to sell his work in the complicated art world holds no interest for him.

The novel keeps returning to the question of what great art is and who gets to decide. Cricket and Olympia are surrounded by friends, mentors, clients, and her rotating cast of suitors. Contrapposto is the stance with most of the body's weight on one leg, and human models matter throughout the book. Cricket tries a variety of methods but keeps returning to drawing people. Translating visual art into prose is a losing proposition for most writers, but Eggers makes it look easy. I finished the book feeling like I’d watched Cricket draw.

Dave Eggers is one of my favorite authors, so I requested and was fortunate to receive an advance reader’s copy. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the third section of this seven-part book, a promising artist is getting absolutely eviscerated in a critique. "Rosenberg said that the artist has to begin with nothingness. You clearly began with a picture in your mind. Which is a problem," her classmate tells her.

This artist, Sharon, is exceptionally talented, so we are expected to take the criticisms she receives as a takedown of the art world at large, where ideas are now valued above technical mastery. Kyle, a fellow student with little actual talent himself, becomes a millionaire by coming up with grandiose ideas he pays other artists with skill to execute. Instead of what's on the canvas, artists are praised for the ideas the art represents, leaving those with superior talents to survive on menial jobs.

What's funny to me about the aforementioned critique is that Eggers absolutely started writing the book with a picture in his mind of what he wanted to say re: art in the modern world and who we elevate and why. And how those less-skilled, like yours truly, can hop on a soapbox and criticize those with far superior talent to their own. The narrative seems secondary, with characters created to support Eggers' views.

As a young boy in Indiana, our protagonist Cricket has outsized dreams that he assumes will take him to Europe before adulthood, as an apprentice to a renowned artist somewhere. One day he meets Pia (later Olympia), who manic pixie dream waltzes into his life with an encyclopedic knowledge of art. Their friendship did grow on me, but in no way is her character even the least bit believable.

While I was mostly on board by the end of the book, I found the novel to be a vehicle for Eggers' thoughts on art, to the point where characters lecture the reader for pages at a time.

As Sharon is being torn down by her peers, as mentioned above, a tenured professor jumps in to defend her:

"You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is not. You have been fed the lie that people enjoy looking at theories and gags and pranks. They do not. You have been fed the lie that your peers' success means your failure. It is not[...B]efore an artist attacks another artist they must vanquish all evil on Earth. After that, go for it."

This professor becomes Cricket's mentor and guidepost, and we the audience are led to believe that commercial success leaves death and destruction in its wake. Not that I'd argue against that, but Eggers opinions are so heavy-handed at times that they overwhelm the novel.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I do think Eggers sticks the landing in regards to Cricket and Olympia, but I'm not sure if their happy ending feels entirely earned.

[Laurel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this story, following the quirky main characters through a lifetime of friendship. But an imbalanced and unhealthy friendship. Strange relationships with each other and with art and the art world. Engaging, but not his best.

[Brianna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book started out kind of slow and then does that thing that books do where it wraps its little ivy-like tendrils around your heart until you can’t stop flipping pages and you must know what these characters, no—friends—will become. Contrapposto is an homage to art, friendship, love, and the pursuit of all of those things as testament to a life well lived. I’ll be thinking about Cricket and Olympia for a good long while I imagine.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review for this book was published by Library Journal in March 2026:

Versatile author and Newbery medalist Eggers (The Eyes & the Impossible) returns with his first adult novel in five years, a personal story born out of his own background as an art-school graduate and illustrated throughout by his own artwork. When nine-year-old Rob “Cricket” Dib meets Olympia Argyros, a year older and wiser and more brazen, she persuades him to help vandalize the town playground with ornate graffiti, an impulsive collaboration with long-lasting consequences. Cricket has the gift of drawing but no vision to harness it; Olympia has her ideals and the decisiveness to spur Cricket into action, together confronting the important question of art versus commerce. For the next six decades, the two orbit each other like satellites, Cricket completely in thrall to Olympia’s free spirit and brash opinions, she finding safe harbor with Cricket’s guilelessness and artistic purity. From art school in the Midwest to a gallery in Chicago, from the coast of Turkey to a remote beach in Cambodia, amid all the successes and tragedies and drudgery of life, Cricket and Olympia find their way back to each other, with their friendship and love as a North Star. VERDICT A tender, searching novel for readers still devastated by Sally Rooney’s Normal People.

Copyright ©2026 Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

[Maarten De Rijk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een meesterlijke tegenpose

Zowat twintig jaar zoemden Cricket en Olympia, de hoofdrolspelers van 'Contrapposto', al rond in het hoofd van Dave Eggers. Groot is de kans dat het duo binnenkort ook bij veel lezers in het hoofd zal blijven gonzen want 'Contrapposto', een breedgespannen bildungsroman over vriendschap, liefde en kunst, is een Eggers grand cru.

Het is intussen van 2021 en 'Het Alles' geleden dat de Amerikaanse auteur Dave Eggers (56) ons trakteerde op een nieuwe roman. In 'Contrapposto' volgen we Robert ‘Cricket’ Dibb, die opgroeit in een gebroken en armlastig gezin in landelijk Indiana. De jonge Cricket heeft wel tekentalent, maar wie zit daar op de Amerikaanse prairie op te wachten? Maar dan ontmoet Cricket de iets oudere Olympia ‘Pia’ Argyros, een vroegwijze en oogverblindende wervelwind. Cricket is meteen betoverd.

De lange en bewegende band tussen Cricket en Olympia en hun gedeelde liefde voor kunst is het centrale motorblok van het boek. Eggers volgt het tweetal over een periode van meer dan 60 jaar. Periodes waarin ze soms continenten van elkaar verwijderd zijn en elkaar jaren niet zien worden afgewisseld met periodes waarin ze (heel) close zijn. Tussen de hoofdstukken laat Eggers soms verschillende jaren verstrijken. Het is aan de lezer om die gaten in de tijd zelf in te vullen.

De verhouding tussen Cricket en Olympia is een klassiek geval van ‘ze kunnen niet met en niet zonder elkaar’, een soort onmogelijke liefde. Cricket lijkt op het eerste gezicht vrij eenvoudig in elkaar te zitten: hij is dol op Olympia en hij tekent graag. Bij dat tekenen ligt zijn plezier in de creatie zelf, bij wat er ontstaat binnen de veilige muren van zijn tekenstudio. Wat er nadien met zijn werk gebeurt – de externe waardering van dat werk, de verkoop,… – is van ondergeschikt belang. De rondstuiterende Olympia is een heel ander type. Zij staat gulzig in het leven, wil de wereld veranderen, een kunstbeweging starten, enz… Olympia is avontuurlijk, haar dadendrang stuwt haar vooruit en ze heeft het daarom moeilijk met Crickets gebrek aan ambitie. Omgekeerd ergert Cricket zich dan weer aan de wispelturigheid en het rusteloze (amoureuze) gefladder van Olympia. Dat onevenwicht leidt tot een voortdurende dynamiek van aantrekken en afstoten.

Wanneer een mogelijke start van een echte romance in de kiem gesmoord wordt, verzucht Cricket bij zichzelf: "Elke keer dat hij dacht dat zij samen iets simpels en zuivers zouden kunnen zijn, levenslange vrienden en geliefden die zich voor elkaar zouden doodvechten, alleen voor elkaar en voor niemand anders, herinnerde zij hem er weer aan dat hij een van de velen was, in ieder stadje een ander schatje, dat zij altijd weer verder moest."

Eggers is natuurlijk niet de eerste auteur die de schemerzone en het spanningsveld tussen vriendschaps – en liefdesrelaties onder de loep neemt. Maar 'Contrapposto' is bijvoorbeeld wel een stuk complexer en gelaagder dan de knipperlichtrelatie tusssen Marianne en Connell in 'Normal People' van Sally Rooney of de kronkelende levenspaden van Emma en Dexter in 'One Day' van David Nicholls. Op woorden als meesterlijk moet je zuinig zijn, maar voor de manier waarop Eggers de relationele eb en vloed tussen Cricket en Olympia beschrijft, vind ik even geen beter woord.

Zelfs in de titel 'Contrapposto' zou je met wat goede wil een metafoor kunnen zien voor de dynamiek tussen Cricket en Olympia. Contrapposto of contrapost is een begrip uit de beeldende kunst en betekent letterlijk tegenpose. Bij die pose worden figuren zo neergezet dat het gewicht op één been (het standbeen) rust en het andere, gebogen been (het speelbeen) wat naar voren komt. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan de David van Michelangelo. In de metafoor zou Cricket kunnen zien als het (vastere) standbeen en Olympia als het (meer buigzame en ontspannen) speelbeen. De contraposthouding heeft iets weg van een vage s-vorm waarbij het bekken licht kantelt. Het is een dynamische pose die bij het poseren vaak gebruikt worden. Niet onbelangrijk: de houding kan lang worden volgehouden.

En terwijl Cricket en Olympia met wisselende afstand en aantrekkingskracht rond elkaar blijven cirkelen als twee hemellichamen of ‘galactische brokstukken’, is kunst de tweede rode draad in 'Contrapposto'. Eggers fileert niet alleen kunstwereld, hij werpt daarbij ook tal van vragen op: Heeft kunst een publiek en waardering nodig om kunst te zijn? Is hedendaagse/postmoderne kunst – denk aan een banaan die met ducttape aan de muur wordt geplakt en miljoenen euro oplevert – doorgeschoten naar holle concepten, ideeën en ‘geintjes’ waarvoor geen klassieke (teken)vaardigheid meer nodig is? Waar ligt de grens tussen vakmanschap en kunst? Is het maken van populaire kunst een bijna puur commerciële business geworden? Enz… Beschouwingen en discussies over kunst in romans worden al snel hoogdravend of vervelend. Niet zo bij Eggers. Als in zijn beste werk combineert de 56-jarige auteur scherzinnigheid met geestigheid.

Niet alles waar twintig jaar of meer aan gewerkt en gesleuteld is, is door dat lange werk per definitie beter. Denk maar aan het Brusselse Justitiepaleis. Gelukkig lijkt 'Contrapposto' meer op een barolo die twintig jaar heeft kunnen rijpen en aan smaak heeft kunnen winnen. Wat mij betreft, is de zomer is het ideale moment om de nieuwe Eggers te ontkurken.

(Recensie voor Tzum 09/06/2026)

[Kathy Eiferle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Contrapposto by Dave Eggers. Spanning nearly the entire life of one man, the novel follows Cricket as he searches for meaning, love, and artistic fulfillment without ever fully recognizing his own worth. Along the way, he finds what seems to be his one true love — someone too broken to understand that he is hers as well.

What moved me most was how deeply I rooted for Cricket, often more than he rooted for himself. As the story unfolded, though, I found myself letting go of my hopes for who he should become and instead simply hoping he found peace and happiness on his own terms.

In lesser hands, this story could have felt quiet or meandering. But Eggers writes with such emotional intelligence and restraint that Cricket’s ordinary struggles become deeply compelling. The novel lingers because it understands how difficult it can be to recognize your own value — and how human it is not to.

A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cricket is a boy who wants a quiet life. He comes from a chaotic household with violent men and an increasingly effectual mother. One day when he is minding his own business when he is co-opted by Pia (Olympia) into vandalising some new play equipment. Not that Cricket understands what he's doing but he does get into trouble for it. Thus begins a long friendship with Olympia that Cricket has little control over as she flits in and out of his life.

Throughout the book we move in leaps through Cricket's life as he begins a life in the art world - sometimes creating, sometimes assisting but always his life will bump up against Olympia's. All Cricket wants to do is create the best work he can and be with the the girl who has been the love of his life since their first meeting. But will he ever get what he wishes for?

Contrapposto was an interesting book even if Cricket's often passive nature did drive me a little crazy at points throughout the book. He certainly seems to make the best of every situation whereas Olympia is permanently restless.

Dave Eggers has given us a character-led novel which ranges through so many aspects of the art world that it is impossible to get bored. Cricket is the main protagonist and he is likeable for most of the book. I certainly enjoyed reading it.

Definitely recommended.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Canongate Books for the digital review copy.

[Jennifer Kafka · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made it to nearly 40% before deciding to stop. I really liked the mom, and some of the other characters had their moments, but overall I found myself pretty bored. The author does have a lovely writing style, and I imagine the plot may become more engaging toward the end—I just didn’t stick around long enough to find out.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

[Kyle Pollock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cricket Dibb is a boy with a gift for drawing and a grandfather who teaches him the one lesson that will outlast everything else: treat hardship like weather, let it pass over you. Silas's basement is the safe room in a house where Cricket's mother's boyfriend Robert is a quiet, constant threat—a real estate developer with a scalpel voice and tiny black eyes, the kind of man who punches a woman in the stomach outside a high school gymnasium. Silas dies early, bequeathing Cricket a philosophy and a nickname. The boy, formerly Rob, becomes Cricket—a distinction that matters because the man upstairs is named Robert, and Cricket wants no confusion between the two of them.

What follows is a sixty-two-year story about a man who keeps trying to see clearly, and everyone who either taught him how or made it harder. At fifteen, Cricket commutes into Chicago for life-drawing classes, learning the canon of proportions from a teacher who tells him that accuracy is the beginning of truth. He works at the Whistlestop train café alongside Jed Shipski, a cynical, belt-buckle-obsessed friend who becomes the conscience Cricket didn't know he needed. He falls under the spell of Olympia—formerly Pia, now insisting she's the reincarnation of Albert Camus—a golden-eyed girl who calls him "my little Cricket," draws a grid on his naked body and kisses each square, and keeps him at precisely the distance she requires. He paints a dead weasel that looks exactly like Robert and wins a blue ribbon for it. It's his first taste of glory and his first lesson in how art can wound.

At a state university, Cricket watches a retired professor named Marcus Carpenter defend a young figurative painter against an art department that has declared representational art obsolete. Carpenter, a gaunt lion in a den of jackals, roars that the school has become a place where those without technical skill terrorize those who possess it—a kind of "upside-down artistic fascism." Cricket becomes his disciple, learning underpainting and glazing and the strange tragedy of the craft: that there is such joy in the brush, only to back away from the canvas and realize it's shit. When the Gulf War comes, Jed's ROTC unit deploys. He dies in a car accident in Kuwait after the ceasefire—a senseless loss the novel refuses to make meaningful. Cricket paints Jed's portrait in uniform and delivers it to his family, who leave it discarded in the garage. His old boss Roulin, the fastidious manager of the Whistlestop, retrieves it and hangs it above the counter. "That's him, that's him, that's him," he says, and it's one of the most quietly devastating scenes in the book.

The decades that follow are a series of driftings and returns. Cricket works as a tile-setter, interns at a sterile Chicago gallery, flees to Turkey to scavenge decommissioned cruise ships. A boiler explosion leaves his back covered in third-degree burns; his girlfriend Sabine leaves him because his "frailty repels" her. Olympia summons him to Philadelphia to work for Kyle Heaney—the same Kyle who was a punchline in college, a single overexposed Polaroid praised as genius by a roomful of true believers—now a wildly successful artist with a factory-scale studio, a diamond-studded gun, and a wife named Honey, a surgeon and filmmaker who suspects her husband is cheating. Cricket builds canvases, befriends a carpenter named Marki, and secretly accompanies Olympia to chemotherapy; she's hidden her stage-three breast cancer from everyone. At a lavish dinner party, Honey drunkenly asks Cricket if everyone knows about the affair. He doesn't answer. The truth, when it comes, is worse than he imagined: the other woman is not the Portuguese curator everyone suspects but Olympia herself. Honey finds the love letters, shoots Kyle six times, drops their son Luka at her mother's, and kills herself in the restaurant where she and Kyle first met. Olympia spirals into heroin addiction and vanishes for seven years.

By the time Cricket is in his late fifties, he's living in Cambodia, copying famous paintings for tourists and adding secret anomalies—a cat here, a rabbit there—for his own amusement. Olympia resurfaces, sober, with new teeth and reconstructed breasts and a banker named James. They make love in the sea under the moon, and he shows her a single radiant sky-painting hidden in a shipping container—the private masterpiece of his life. She wants to sell a series. He refuses. She wants him to leave with her. He refuses. She tells him he's "running out the clock." He tells her he's happy. "I'm not the one who dies," he says. "The other men die." She gets on her plane.

The novel ends in Paris, where Cricket, now seventy-four and walking with damaged shoulders from a bicycle accident, runs a small atelier and teaches students to see. Olympia appears unannounced on audition night. She drops her robe, points to him, and asks him to pose with her—nude, together, in front of his students—and he does. Afterward, in a blacked-out apartment, they soak in a cool bath and talk about the five hundred and twenty weeks that might remain in a life. At midnight they return to the studio and look through the students' drawings of them: tragic at first, then softening, their bodies becoming vines around trees, roots around stones. They set the pictures side by side until they tell a story.

It's difficult to convey how patiently this novel accrues its power. The prose is deceptively plain—declarative, unflashy, almost documentary in its accumulation of detail—and for long stretches nothing dramatic happens. Cricket draws. He works. He eats. He swims. He drifts from Indiana to Turkey to Cambodia to Paris, never quite poor, never quite successful, never quite in love with anyone but the one person he can never fully have. Yet the book's restraint is its argument. It refuses to inflate its events into epiphanies, just as Cricket refuses to inflate his life into a career. The result is a novel that feels less like a plotted story than like the actual texture of a consciousness moving through time—the way certain afternoons lodge in the mind while entire years dissolve, the way grief doesn't resolve but simply recurs in different keys.

The art-world satire is precise and damning, but it's never the book's main engine. The critique scene in college—where Sharon's masterful crucifixion painting is savaged by a roomful of students and faculty who praise a single Polaroid of someone else's photograph—is a set piece of almost unbearable cruelty. Professor Arcenaux, with his sleeveless denim and his one squiggle painting in the Corcoran, is a villain of pure mediocrity, the kind of man who destroys what he cannot do. Carpenter's defense of Sharon—"Beauty justifies itself!"—is the novel's aesthetic manifesto, but it's also a losing argument. The book understands that the Arcenauxs of the world usually win, at least institutionally. Kyle Heaney becomes the proof: a man with no discernible talent who builds an empire by recognizing what other people can do and putting his name on it. The novel's treatment of him is almost generous—he's not a monster, just hollow, a conduit who mistakes himself for a source—and that generosity makes his fate feel less like justice than like the collapse of a structure that was never sound.

The supporting cast is where the book earns its deepest texture. Silas, with his train-disaster books and his refusal to clear the spiderwebs, is the novel's moral center, and his death early in the book leaves a silence that never quite fills. Robert, the abusive boyfriend, reappears just often enough to remind you the violence was real; Cricket's painting of him as a roadkill weasel is one of the book's best quiet gut-punches. June, Cricket's mother, is the harder figure—never fully villain or victim, drifting into drink and distance as the damage outlasts the relationship—and her eventual death barely gets a memorial, which feels less like an oversight than the book being honest about how unceremonious some grief actually is. Teresa, who humiliates a young Cricket for wetting the bed, is a small, mean moment the book doesn't dwell on but doesn't let you forget—part of why a stolen mandarin orange becomes such a loaded object of comfort. Jed is the heart of the middle section, and his death is the kind of senseless loss the novel refuses to sentimentalize. Roulin, who hangs the rejected portrait, is proof that fatherhood can be done in a few key moments—a hand on the shoulder, a painting on the wall. Honey, defined essentially by one drunken confession, is nonetheless indelible: you don't need more of her to feel the weight of what she does with what she learns.

And then there is Olympia. She is the gravitational center of the book—brilliant, reckless, magnetic, exhausting, impossible to hold and impossible to leave. She talks in thunderclap laughs and obscure references, she gets married as a green-card favor and doesn't mention it until afterward, she stages a barge installation recreating dead soldiers' bedrooms, she hides her cancer from everyone but Cricket, she sleeps with her married boss and destroys a family. She is, in many ways, a monster of appetite and ambition. Yet the novel never judges her, and Cricket never stops loving her. Their relationship is the book's central mystery: not why they're drawn together, but why they can't stay that way. She wants more—more paintings, more money, more recognition, more life—and he wants enough. That's the irreconcilable difference. The novel refuses to take sides, and it's this refusal that makes their final reunion in Paris so moving. They're old now. The argument is over. What's left is the standing together.

What I keep coming back to is the afternoon Cricket spends building a skateboard with Luka, Kyle and Honey's shy, steady son, while Honey drinks herself toward the murder she'll commit that night. It's a glimpse of an entirely different life—present, rooted, a kid who'd take to him as a father—and Cricket just lets it pass. He drifts back to Cambodia, to one perfect unshared painting, to a woman he sees twice a decade. That's a flaw in him, honestly; part of you wants him to have fought for that connection. But it's a lifelike flaw rather than a careless one. Real people let those afternoons go all the time, without a clean reason, and spend decades not quite explaining why. The book doesn't resolve whether Cricket's contentment was wisdom or evasion, and I don't think it's supposed to. It simply holds the question open, the way the sea holds light.

There's a moment late in the novel when Cricket, dancing with a stranger on the banks of the Seine, thinks: No one tells us. No one tells us that our spirits stay delightable, surpriseable, porous and tingling. That's the book's quiet thesis. Cricket has been knocked down by a bicycle, burned in an explosion, abandoned by lovers, outlived by his friends, and he is still, at seventy-four, capable of being surprised by joy. He never became the great painter he dreamed of being at fifteen. He never got summoned to Europe; he just went there himself, decades late, and started teaching. The atelier he runs is full of cacti and baked goods and students who bring him babies to hold. It's not a masterpiece. It's a life. And the novel's final image—two aging bodies rendered by many hands, their story told in charcoal and paper—suggests that this, in the end, is enough. The absurd world is justified only aesthetically. The rest is weather.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Master class on art and friendship.

Contropposto is both thought-provoking and tender, raising big questions about what we create, what we value, and how we connect with one another.

Themes of art vs commerce, friendship vs romantic love, creativity vs reproduction.

“She was his greatest friend and also a sorceress and all the worlds storms combined and contained “

[Trisha]

I really liked The Circle - same author! so I'm excited to get to this one!
Pub date: 06/2026

A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe a 4.5, but man, I loved this.

During his adolescence, Robert “Cricket” Dibb meets a fascinating girl named Olympia when she ropes him into defacing a public playground. The relationship between these two characters becomes the focal point of Egger’s beautiful novel. Following Cricket and Olympia from adolescence into their seventies, they are sometimes strangers, sometimes colleagues, sometimes lovers, and sometimes friends, spending time together and apart, but always connected. All of this time together, set against the backdrop of the art world. Eggers thoughtfully explores the impact others can have on our lives, the power of human connection, and the questions, “What is art?” and “What role does it play in our lives?”

Embarrassingly, this was my first Dave Eggers novel. But I assure, it will not be my last. His ability to craft characters…I truly felt as if I lived life with Cricket and Olympia after completing this one. Highly recommend!

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am absolutely gob smacked by this book, which I consumed over two days. I knew nothing about it going in except that I always enjoy Eggers’ work. I’d recommend the same approach, and be sure you have lots of time to give it.

This is an easy-to-read and complex masterpiece of a story that takes place over a lifetime. A full life. It’s about friendship and discovery and hardship, and art, of course. It’s about living. And beauty. And loss. And pain. It’s gorgeously written and complex in detail. It reads at times like a drawing or painting. Like the words were rendered on the page. It has left me stupid and full of these vague descriptions. Read it so you can be left stupid, too.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

as an art historian of modern and contemporary art, this really hit the spot.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eggers is obviously very capable, but this just isn’t good. I was never able to buy into the characters or their stories. Nothing about them scanned as believable or relatable to the human condition in any way. They read like cartoon characters. The plot felt contrived and uninspired with no point of view and nothing to say. It’s easy to finish in an afternoon—and I’m sure I’ll forget it all by tomorrow afternoon—so I don’t feel my time was wasted.

[Julianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you Penguin random house for reaching out and suggesting I read this book, and for Net Galley for providing the ARC. Wow....this book was art. My favorite thing about a story is that you are able to learn about characters, and learn about them during a small chunk in time.

**spoilers below***

What I loved so much about this novel was the fact that we were able to follow the story of our two main characters through their full lives. As soon as Cricket was introduced to to Olympia and her wildness, I had a feeling that she would stick around for a while, and truly through all seasons of life she did. I loved that the description on the book didn't give too much away- and I'm so glad to have seen that their budding romance turned into something more as the years went on. I would hope that each time their path's connected it would be "their time" but then again, they both lived such fruitful lives, that if they did stay together from the beginning, they maybe wouldn't have had all those experiences?!
As an artist myself who teaches drawing and art history I truly felt so connected to the behind the scenes of the art. I was incredibly blown away by the knowledge of the author when it came to many art easter eggs- so either he is familiar with the art world or he did a lot of research - bravo! Overall such an incredible story, so powerful when it comes to searching for oneself and recognizing how special we are, and how much the world has to offer. I will be starting a series on social media about books that talk about art, and will be including this into that series. I will tag!!!

[John Waites · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contrapposto pulled me in with its heart as much as its ideas. Following Cricket and Olympia across years of friendship, art, and hard choices, this felt less like reading and more like living beside them. Eggers captures the push and pull between creativity, love, and personal freedom while giving a sharp look at the art world without losing the emotional core. Cricket especially was a character that stood out to me—so much of who he becomes lives between the lines. Tender, immersive, and quietly powerful.

[Abby Paulnock · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt like I was apart of this story. I experienced every high and low with the characters throughout their life time. The writing and development of Cricket was amazingly done. So much of how he behaves and the decisions he makes is unwritten yet can be explained by his past. This book is an immersive experience involving love, art, hardships, and revolution.

[Mary Fabrizio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eggers is a brilliant writer and I was thrilled to receive an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. The two main characters are well drawn but I just couldn't connect with them or their world. I didn't see the magnetic pull of Olympia over Cricket. She's hardly likeable, let alone loveable. I did find the art world from their perspectives intriguing but I constantly felt too ignorant to relate. Eggers has a way of doing that, making me feel like I'm not up to his intellectual level and leaving me frustrated.

[Gideonleek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found my princess laying inna bathroom, laying inna bathroom…

Drake is so awesome guys

[Tara - runningnreading · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars - rounding up!

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genius, Thank Heavens, Is Not the Point
Dave Eggers’s “Contrapposto” is best when it looks past artistic aura to the rooms, hands, invoices, and old wounds behind the work.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | June 3rd, 2026


“Under the Difficult Light” – Two aging figures hold still in the atelier’s unforgiving mercy, turning “Contrapposto”’s lifelong argument about looking, art, exposure, and love into the final vulnerability of being drawn.

Drawing, in Dave Eggers’s “Contrapposto,” begins as a basement hideout of mildew, spiderwebs, and drawing paper. Before it becomes discipline, work, memorial, fraud, comfort, or an object waiting for a buyer, it is the page Cricket Dib can keep uncontaminated. The title names a pose – weight shifted, body held in asymmetrical balance – but the imbalance it keeps testing belongs to two lives: Cricket, the boy who learns to see, and Olympia Sabbatini, the girl who teaches him that seeing can be used. His stillness meets her hunger for the next room; his hand meets her talent for staging; his longing meets her lifelong reflex for elsewhere. Its subject is not genius, thank heavens. Genius is usually where artist novels go to put their feet up. Eggers is after the more troublesome transaction: the route by which looking becomes drawing, display becomes price, and price begins making claims of its own.

Eggers gives “Contrapposto” a premise clean enough for a jacket and unruly on the page. Cricket grows up in northwest Indiana, in a house kept under domestic weather by his mother’s abusive boyfriend and briefly made habitable by his grandfather Silas, whose basement is part greenhouse, part bunker, part minor kingdom of plants, records, spiders, disaster books, and drawing paper. Cricket’s early life is a study in containment: the room below the house, the page, the chosen name that lets him stop being Rob. Then Pia appears. She is a year older, golden-eyed, ferociously alive to talent and danger. She recognizes his gift almost at once and puts it to use in the spirit of a child impresario with poor impulse control: she recruits him to vandalize a playground with obscene calligraphy, shame converted into lettering.


“Basement Kingdom” – In Silas’s basement, drawing begins as shelter: a child, a page, a weak pool of light, and the first private room where fear can be rearranged into form.

Much of the opening runs on this queasy chemistry: fear sharpened by instruction, instruction charged by danger. Oana, a nearly wordless Romanian artist, teaches Cricket charcoal, watercolor, scale, and obedience to what is actually there before the self begins improving it. Pia, who becomes Olympia, teaches him staging, nerve, timing, and how beauty can smuggle offense into the room. His first public triumph – a prize-winning dead weasel bearing the face of his mother’s domestic tyrant – gives the book one of its earliest proofs that a picture can point a finger. The painting is exact, vindictive, funny, frightening, and hard to deny. It says what no one in Cricket’s house can safely say. It also reveals, early, that art in this novel will not be allowed to remain innocent merely because it is well made.

Every major movement finds Cricket and Olympia after time has rearranged the room and left them pretending not to notice the furniture. Adolescence brings figure drawing, a library exhibit of nudes taken down, and the steadier company of Jed Shipski and Roulin at the Whistlestop. Young adulthood brings university critique rooms, Marcus Carpenter’s rural atelier, anti-war art, and Jed’s death in Kuwait; Cricket’s portrait of him becomes one of the novel’s most humane acts of witness. Chicago brings Olympia’s “Bedrooms of the Dead,” an immersive memorial installation that places Jed’s room beside rooms belonging to dead Iraqi brothers. Later, the art world expands into Kyle Heaney’s factory-scale studio, where many hands manufacture the work attached to one famous name. Cambodia gives Cricket retreat, copying, water, and one private painting of sea and sky. Paris gives him old age, teaching, and Olympia’s final entrance.

The prose is best when it teaches without announcing the lesson. Eggers writes in plain, exacting, scene-built sentences that rarely dress for applause, though they often carry small pleasures of particularity. He keeps the eye on proportion, surface, room, and gesture: the fruit in Oana’s lesson, a model’s body under classroom light, a gallery wall too short for the paintings it is supposed to dignify, a shipping container transformed into a viewing chamber for grief. The comedy comes from the same precision. A child misunderstands adult obscenity with devotional seriousness. A gallery person makes commerce sound like weather. Someone explains a career as if ordering soup. Eggers is very good at museum hush and at the pinprick that lets the air out.

Rooms matter more here than manifestos. Silas’s basement, Oana’s lesson room, the removed library exhibit, the barge installation, Kyle’s studio, the Paris atelier: each space is arranged so that looking becomes an event with a debt attached. “Bedrooms of the Dead” is the strongest example. It could have been grief tourism with lighting cues. Instead, it wounds and implicates. Visitors are undone by it; Cricket can barely enter it. The work honors the dead and uses them. It turns private rooms into public experience, mourning into architecture, absence into an encounter. The book is at its sharpest when it refuses to sort those facts into the comforting piles marked tribute and trespass.


“Bedrooms of the Dead” – A memorial room waits between tribute and trespass, turning private grief into architecture and asking what art owes the absent bodies it makes visible.

Its quiet structural elegance comes from the seven-panel design. The book trusts return more than continuity. Cricket and Olympia do not simply age; they reappear to each other under altered terms. Child and provocateur become artist and editor, mourner and curator, maker and dealer, caretaker and patient, exile and rescuer, old bodies and models. The gaps do not dodge feeling; they let feeling arrive late. A smoother chronology might have explained the relationship into smaller pieces. This design lets it retain pressure: two lives repeatedly shifted into counterpose, each new arrangement revealing what the previous one concealed.

Plot arrives not as a single tightening thread but as a series of lit rooms: a person returns, a space is rebuilt, a wound acquires a new use. There are deaths, illnesses, affairs, exhibitions, reinventions, and one appalling act of violence that darkens the art-world chapters. Yet “Contrapposto” is not powered by suspense. It is a long portrait with one taut line of pressure, and the questions are not the sleepy pair available to any novel about galleries – is art noble, is the art world fake? The sharper question is whether art can give form to damage without taking ownership of it. Can one person see another without converting that person into material someone else can use?

At the center of that question is Olympia, the book’s sharpest tool and loudest instrument. She is funny, theatrical, manipulative, loyal, wounded, and almost indecently gifted at identifying what an artist should do next. She sees Cricket’s talent before he can claim it. She also keeps turning his privacy toward display. She is a muse only if one imagines a muse who arrives with a matchbook, a press list, a business plan, and a talent for making everyone in the room feel either chosen or underdressed. Cricket’s blessing and trouble is that she is often right. Her vulgarity has vision inside it. Her cruelty sometimes has taste. Even her worst ideas know where the light should fall.

Practice, not aura, is one of the novel’s saving subjects. Art here is not inspiration followed by applause. It is stretching, copying, pricing, posing, lifting, hanging, repairing, staffing, sweating, persuading, and explaining the object to people who have learned to call money “support.” Kyle’s studio is the clearest anatomy of other people’s hands under one name: assistants, vendors, fabricators, handlers, lawyers, and administrators circle the signature that will sell the work. Cricket is appalled, fascinated, and implicated. The book is better for letting all three responses stand. The famous signature is often the cleanest surface in the dirtiest room.

Against that factory floor of the signature, Cambodia offers a quieter comic side room. Cricket copies famous paintings for tourists and slips tiny private deviations into them, enjoying craft stripped of consequence. Then Olympia sees the one painting he has made for himself – a spare canvas bright with sea and weather – and instantly imagines a show, a series, a price ladder, perhaps even a “School of Cricket.” The joke is the speed of conversion: solitude becomes inventory before the paint has spiritually dried. The hurt is that she is not entirely wrong. Art hidden forever has its vanity; art sold too quickly has another. That compromised interval is where the novel breathes best.

Drawn across decades, “Contrapposto” keeps returning to an old problem that still feels raw: whose hand made the work, whose name sold it, and who disappeared between the two. It never needs to chase the day’s arguments about authorship or value; the arguments are already in the rooms. A private painting becomes a market opportunity. A studio assistant becomes one hand inside someone else’s fame. A memorial becomes an event. A body becomes subject, proof, embarrassment, priced image, and finally line. Its pressure comes from the old transaction that still rules so much art: one hand makes, another name ascends.

Its best comparisons belong at a polite distance. Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” shares the belief that making can be escape hatch and discipline at once. Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” offers another long view of creative partnership complicated by work, intimacy, injury, and ambition. Eggers is less propulsive than Chabon and less pop-cultural than Zevin. His best pages do not rush toward triumph or heartbreak. They watch gifted people use one another over decades and ask whether use, in the end, is always another name for harm.

More than once, the novel catches itself believing in beauty and then checks the invoice. Carpenter’s defense of skill and seriousness gives Cricket a language for what he wants to make, but Eggers never confuses technique with innocence. A beautifully rendered body may still be an exposure. A memorial may still be theft with lighting. A market success may still be the deadening repetition of the first living impulse. The novel keeps beauty close and its alibis at arm’s length. Cynicism would have been easier. So would reverence. Eggers chooses the more difficult posture: admiration with a raised eyebrow, love with the receipt still visible.

Inevitably, though, such sweep exacts a price. The decade-leaping structure gives the novel breadth, but it sometimes compresses aftershock. War death, cancer, addiction, professional collapse, murder-suicide, and reinvention move through the book with a speed that can feel more architectural than emotional. These chapters are selected poses across time, not excavations, and the panel form has a cost: some shadows are placed accurately but not allowed to lengthen. The novel knows where to put its figures. Occasionally one wishes it would leave them there a little longer, under the difficult light.

That imbalance is sharpest around Olympia. Her partial unknowability belongs to Cricket’s experience of her, and the book would be weaker if it explained her into tidiness. Still, she can sometimes feel like weather: she enters, changes the pressure, moves Cricket into the next phase of himself, and leaves the furniture rearranged. Her inner life appears by flare rather than steady deepening. That tilt is thematically apt, because Cricket has spent his life mistaking her effect on him for knowledge of her. It is also the book’s chief artistic constraint. Their relationship is never thin, but its force comes from tilt, and tilt withholds as much as it reveals.

Rated at 84/100 and 4/5 Goodreads-compatible whole stars, “Contrapposto” is a novel with reach, traction, and seams that catch the light. Its strength lies in design, feeling, and argument: it knows where to place a scene, where to let it sting, and where to make it answer back. The prose is consistently agile and often very funny, but the book’s excellence is not mainly verbal dazzle. The rating reflects real admiration without pretending away the compression, the overabundance, or the way Olympia’s brilliance can become a screen as well as a light.

One reason the book lands as well as it does is that the ending refuses prefabricated consolation. It does not marry Cricket and Olympia, punish them into clarity, or crown their long entanglement as fate. Instead, it reverses the direction of sight. Cricket, who has spent his life learning to look, becomes the object of looking. Olympia, who has spent her life arranging scenes, stages one more and then has to endure its evidence. The final atelier sequence is theatrical, tender, faintly ridiculous, and right.

Paris is not handed over as a retirement brochure. Cricket is old, physically limited by a bicycle accident, and sustained by the routines of teaching. His atelier gathers the book’s earlier instructors into one late practice: Oana’s attention, Agnes Winter’s bodies, Carpenter’s rigor, Silas’s belief in the private world one can conjure. When Olympia arrives under a false name and drops her robe before the students, she is prankster, supplicant, performer, and friend. Pulling Cricket onto the platform, she turns their whole history into a pose.

Old age becomes the book’s last drawing problem: not how to soften the body into wisdom, but how to draw it without lying. Eggers does not ask us to admire age as a moral achievement, that suspiciously tidy consolation. He asks us to look at old bodies as bodies: scarred, altered, comic, erotic in memory if not in advertisement, still capable of warmth, embarrassment, and form. The students’ drawings first make Cricket and Olympia appear almost apocalyptic. Then the images shift. They soften. They show two figures dancing, leaning, settling into one another. The drawings do not correct life, but they make a sequence of it.

Under the art-world comedy and lifelong attachment plot, “Contrapposto” is about how to see without taking. Cricket’s gift is attention, but attention can possess. Olympia’s gift is activation, but activation can consume. Kyle’s gift is scale, but scale can erase the hands that make it possible. The book’s best judgment lies in its suspicion of tidy labels. Witness can become trespass. Privacy can become cowardice. Publicness can become vulgarity. Beauty can be true and still badly used.

Like the pose from which it takes its name, the novel is strongest when it lets imbalance remain visible. Cricket and Olympia are not balanced because they complete each other. They are balanced because each throws the other off-center in a way that produces form. The book’s wit keeps that form from becoming marble. People say foolish things about art. Shows are badly hung. Desire arrives at inconvenient angles. Money hovers nearby, pretending to be taste. Someone always has a theory, and someone else always has to lift the canvas.

Of all the book’s gifts, the most durable may be its understanding that art is not a realm above life, but one of the ways life gets arranged, misarranged, mourned, copied, priced, and sometimes understood. “Contrapposto” is not fooled by beauty, but it is not embarrassed by loving it. That distinction matters. Cynicism would have been easier; so would a soft-focus hymn to art’s redeeming power. Eggers chooses the posture that suits his title: knees unlocked, weight shifted, still looking.

Still, the last image belongs neither to the famous artist nor the buyer, neither the critic nor the market, neither the curator nor the signed canvas. It belongs to two aging friends under light that refuses to flatter and still forgives, caught by younger hands in charcoal and line. They have spent a lifetime making and evading pictures of themselves. Now they stand before the drawings, amused, wounded, exposed, and, for once, almost still.


Compositional Thumbnail Sheet – Small studies of platform, bodies, easels, and negative space show how the final image’s stillness was chosen from many possible arrangements of looking and being seen.


Faint Pencil Underdrawing – The first graphite structure leaves Cricket and Olympia almost weightless on the page, before wash, color, or atmosphere have begun to decide what the pose means.


Character Anatomical Study – Fragmented studies of shoulders, hands, knees, torsos, and weight shifts search for old bodies drawn without flattery, sentiment, or cruelty.


Pencil-Plus-First-Wash Stage – The first pale washes begin to separate flesh from room, warmth from shadow, and the figures’ exposed stillness from the surrounding studio air.


Color Swatch Sheet – The cover-derived palette becomes a working vocabulary of rust, salmon, teal, gray, cream, and violet, mapping the book’s warmth, unease, labor, and late-life light.


Alternative Book Cover Art Dust Jacket Flap – A looser companion study explores how the watercolor language might converse with the cover’s stacked figure drawings without replacing its own quiet atelier logic.

All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A literary beach read (complimentary)

[Raymond Muraida · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, what the heck is a “contrapposto?” A quick search on Google says the word is Italian for “counterpose” which is an “artistic technique where a human figure stands with most of its weight shifted onto one foot.” Google went on to say that the most famous example of this is the sculpture of David by Michelangelo. I’ll admit, I was more like, okay, well that didn’t help. But with further and intense research (meaning I continued reading), I found that contrapposto has three key elements of the pose: 1) Weight-bearing vs. Relaxed: “one leg carries the body’s weight (tense) while the other is bent and relaxed; 2) Tilted Axes: “the hips tilt at one angle while the shoulder tilt at an opposing angle to maintain balance; and 3) Lifelike Realism: “instead of standing stiff and straight, the figure appears ready to move or caught mid-step.

Cricket Dib is an unforgettable character. Born in Indiana with no advantages, he discovers early that he can draw and draw well. A gift that becomes both his greatest joy and, in many ways, his heaviest burden. Even in the beginning, he takes his drawings to the local library to be displayed only to find that other folks are critical of his models, not his art, and all of his drawings are taken down by the police. This begins his discomfort with bringing his art to the masses or even to another person. From the moment he meets Olympia Argyros, a girl who is one year older and seemingly born knowing everything Cricket is still trying to figure out, his life is set on a journey that will carry him from Indiana to Cambodia to New York to Paris over the next six decades. The relationship between Cricket and Olympia is central to the novel. Contrapposto is not a simple love story, but something much more complicated. The two of them are bound together by art, by mutual (well, most of the time) admiration, by need, and by timing that never quite cooperates.

Here’s where the title fits in. Remember those three elements of contrapposto: the weight-bearing leg versus the relaxed one; the tilted axes balancing against each other; and the figure caught mid-step, always appearing ready to move? That is Cricket and Olympia. Cricket is the weight-bearing leg throughout the novel. He is tense and he carries the full burden of a true and genuine artistic talent in a world that doesn't always know what to do with it. He has the gift and is committed to the process of making art; but he is perpetually on the outside of the commercial art world looking in. Bad luck follows him. Opportunities slip away. Yet he never stops making art. Olympia, by contrast, is the relaxed leg. She has money, connections, and an instinctive fluency with the art world as a business. She succeeds at nearly every avenue she pursues. But the relaxed leg is not the stronger one. Olympia’s success is fleeting. And the tilted axes? That would be Cricket and Olympia for over sixty years, always counterbalancing, never quite aligned, maintaining a kind of equilibrium that neither of them could have managed alone.

Through the various chapters, that includes art school, sign painting, working for a former classmate who became a millionaire by having others execute what he couldn't create himself, painting copies of iconic works, and running an atelier, Eggers is asking (though at times it appears to be full blown lecturing) the reader to think hard about what art actually is. Cricket's answer is simple and beautiful: art is the personal satisfaction of creating something that didn’t exist before. Even when he is painting copies of iconic art, he is creating something new and special for himself. For example, he adds a discrete cat to Picasso’s Guernica. He keeps his best work hidden in a shipping container on a bluff in Cambodia. He paints signs. He lays tile. He finds joy in the process itself. The art world, in all its pretension and corruption and occasional genuine beauty, is rendered with both affection and a sharp eye, and by the end you have thought more seriously about the philosophy of art than you ever expected. Thanks Dave!

And then there is Paris. Ahh, this chapter brought me to well-deserved tears; particularly with what is presented on the last six pages. I won't give away the ending, except to say that it earns everything the novel has been building toward and it is handled with the tenderness it deserves. It is Cricket and Olympia, now in their seventies, finally without the interference of bad timing and impossible circumstances. Think back to that third element of contrapposto: the figure caught mid-step, always appearing ready to move. Cricket has been caught mid-step his entire life, always about to arrive somewhere, never quite sticking the landing. Paris is where he finally arrives. The ending filled my soul, and I suspect it will fill yours too. Contrapposto is a big, warm, and quietly heartbreaking novel about what it costs to love art and to love another person across a lifetime.

An E-ARC of Contrapposto by Dave Eggers was provided by the Marketing Manager from publisher Alfred Knopf via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

[sasha baldsten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. I don’t even know what to say.

What *are* you supposed to say after witnessing someone’s entire life? What *do* you write down when you want to talk about not just a book, but a —two— fully formed humans?

I don’t know how, or even why, but I picked up this book knowing I would love it. I paid twenty euros for my copy, which is double the price i normally pay, because i wanted to own it so badly right in that moment in which i first saw it, even though I had only read one chapter.

I think this book had the best ending of any book I’ve ever read. Like I am almost 100% certain. So so many books out there that don’t necessarily *don’t* stick the landing, but just have it come off as a nice conclusion. But nothing more than that.

‘Contrapposto’ however takes every beautiful concept explored throughout the book —Cricket drawing nudes, Cricket drawing Olympia, Cricket posing nude, Olympia’s insecurity— and forms them into one gorgeous scene that is all those things mixed and combined with others. And on top of that, after four hundred pages and seventy years, we as the reader get to *see* Olympia, and Cricket. Or, more importantly, Olympia and Cricket.

I also think that Cricket’s transformation and character development might be one of my favourite metamorphoses i’ve ever been allowed to see.
He starts out as this shy, dreamy, in his head, quiet boy, one who barely even speaks actual dialogue in the conversations he has.
And then, he turns into a very realistic, down to earth handyman, who effortlessly spars during conversations with Olympia and says what’s on his mind, who isn’t ashamed anymore.

In the same breath, you can talk about Olympia’s constant transformation and the true storm she is and always was. More or less, she stays the same throughout the story. Loud, herself, lovely, unafraid, but also tumultuous, lashing out, jealous and never knowing when to stop.
Until she chooses the calm. Even though it takes her seventy years. But that’s alright, because she has 520 weeks left, and that’s a long time to be calm.

I truly adore Olympia. I see so much of myself in her, though not everything of course, and am simultaneously as in love with her as Cricket is.

Jed I cannot talk about without tearing up. Cricket’s first friend (apart from Olympia of course), and the glue that held them together. They were, as Carpenter (or was it the other artist?) said, a trio. And with one of them missing, they fell apart a little. Especially Olympia, but you could see it in Cricket too. I think Olympia’s grief almost postponed itself, while Cricket’s hit hard and fast. But I’m not a psychologist, so who knows.

Just like I think ‘A Little Life’ is a love letter to life itself, ‘Contrapposto’ is a love letter to Art and Vulnerability and romantic love.

I’ve been an artist my whole life, though my passions shifted more than once. At first it was drawing or painting or anything similar, then I turned to theatre and acting for a while, and now I live my life between the stage and my notebook, in which I write poems, and hope to write books in some day. In other words, I’m a jack of trades, or a hoe of hobbies.

But this book reignited my passion for the canvas. I picked AP art as one of my advanced courses for my last two years at school, and was beginning to regret that choice, but this book made all my worries leave me.

Of course, everything they created was very inspiring, but that fucking show about Jed’s and Faisal’s three brothers bedrooms on the barge?? Genuinely breathtaking. Wowzer.

They are in love with art, and with each other, and I am in love with both of them, and with both of them together.

But also, never has anyone cheated like they cheat. My oh my. How many partners do they cheat on throughout this book???

There’s Stuart, the Argentinian, Gwen, James, and that’s not even counting the 70 years of emotional cheating they did. Arrest them.

Oh Olympia. You would have loved that BDP diagnosis. I think you and Willem Ragnarsson would get along well.

(No but seriously. Olympia’s constant change of names?? Olympia, Pia, Camus, Ollie, Limpy, Lim??? Talk about unstable sense of identity. lol)

I truly yearn to have the understanding of and passion for art that Olympia and Cricket do, especially in the early stages of their life. I yearn for the way they always find their way back to each other (I drunkenly told my best friend about this yesterday, and I stand by it.), in all stages of their life. I yearn for the tumultuous support and understanding they gave each other, but especially for the slow, steady, horrifyingly vulnerable surrender during that last, shared stage of their life.

Those last few lines above were written that way on purpose.
“Their life” not “Their lives.”

Because as intertwined as they are, I think it is justifiable to count their life as one. I think it’s what they would do too.