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Contrapposto
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.
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.
501 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 9, 2026
About the author
Dave Eggers
347 books9,798 followersDave 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 348 reviews
July 13, 2026
See, I'm a big Eggers skeptic, as I think that his most famous novels, The Circle and The Every, are simplistic and protest surveillance capitalism and the platform economy with cardboard characters and a predictable plot, which, you know: This could have been an op-ed. But I just can't resist a big novel set in the art world, and this is an epic story about art and friendship spanning over several decades - what can I say, I was hooked.
Our main character is the introverted and art-obsessed Robert Dibb aka Cricket - we meet him as a kid, and in a crucial passage he is surprised that someone might see a cricket as vermin, as for him, it's a bird that cannot fly (metaphor alert!!!). So young Cricket grows up in a neglectful and abusive home, but inspired by his grandfather, he seeks shelter in drawing and painting. He befriends a slightly older, eccentric girl named Olympia (which is not only a reference to the Greed gods, but also to Manet's scandalous painting) from a rather wealthy, but also rather criminal family, who will accompany him on and off into their seventies: Cricket moves from dreaming of becoming a bohemian artist to realizing that he does not seek fame, but happiness in creation, while Olympia throws herself into the art machine of notoriety and commerce, repeatedly challenging Cricket to make more of himself. They will follow each other around the globe, oscillating between romantic love, sex, and friendship.
And then there's Jed, whom teenage Cricket befriends when they both work at a convenience store at a train station, a boy who joins the army, but dreams of working in the art world as well. In a way, Cricket and Jed are brought up not by their violent families, but by their mentors: Young Olympia, Roulin, the owner of the convenience store who believes in their capabilities and protects them whenever he can, and Carpenter, a former professor who encourages the boys to train and grow in their abilities.
In a way, this is a classic Künstlerroman, showing how Cricket develops his craft, ponders what "selling out" means and how to make a living, experiences the academic and commercial art world where craft clashes with ideas, and finds a very individual way to be in the world. Sure, the formation of character takes center stage, but just as much, the novel juggles the ideas people have about art, their impulses to define what art is and what it should do - art itself has successfully laughed of these attempts for millennia, and will continue to do so. But it is so-so-fun to join in the fun, to witness people grappling with what makes us human: Seeking ways to express and share our own consciousness, an ultimately futile endeavor that holds the power to produce beauty and the sublime. And Eggers beautifully connects these themes with the art of friendship: To novel starts with a quote by Georgia O'Keeffe: "To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."
And yes, Eggers takes his time telling his story, but I didn't find the pacing too slow, and his witty remarks and knowledge about the subject matter enhance the experience: Growing up, Eggers has dreamed of becoming an artist. While he majored in journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he also took art classes, and he does still work as a visual artist, with his own representation and gallery exhibits and even a show at the Nevada Museum of Art. On top of that, he has announced that he will run a tuition-free art school in San Francisco from January 2027 on (Art + Water).
Contrapposto is a term taken from the visual arts, describing a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot, so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips (you've seen this in statues, for example). This movement of center and weight is an aesthetic component within the story, which ebbs and flows, but never loses traction. The drawings contained in the physical book were crafted by the author.
Much, much better than Eggers' supposedly political work: I think I love novels about artists so much because they ponder the power humans hold to create beauty and share emotions. In times like these when everything seems fucked, they somehow remind me that we are not doomed. Not neccessarily, at least.
Our main character is the introverted and art-obsessed Robert Dibb aka Cricket - we meet him as a kid, and in a crucial passage he is surprised that someone might see a cricket as vermin, as for him, it's a bird that cannot fly (metaphor alert!!!). So young Cricket grows up in a neglectful and abusive home, but inspired by his grandfather, he seeks shelter in drawing and painting. He befriends a slightly older, eccentric girl named Olympia (which is not only a reference to the Greed gods, but also to Manet's scandalous painting) from a rather wealthy, but also rather criminal family, who will accompany him on and off into their seventies: Cricket moves from dreaming of becoming a bohemian artist to realizing that he does not seek fame, but happiness in creation, while Olympia throws herself into the art machine of notoriety and commerce, repeatedly challenging Cricket to make more of himself. They will follow each other around the globe, oscillating between romantic love, sex, and friendship.
And then there's Jed, whom teenage Cricket befriends when they both work at a convenience store at a train station, a boy who joins the army, but dreams of working in the art world as well. In a way, Cricket and Jed are brought up not by their violent families, but by their mentors: Young Olympia, Roulin, the owner of the convenience store who believes in their capabilities and protects them whenever he can, and Carpenter, a former professor who encourages the boys to train and grow in their abilities.
In a way, this is a classic Künstlerroman, showing how Cricket develops his craft, ponders what "selling out" means and how to make a living, experiences the academic and commercial art world where craft clashes with ideas, and finds a very individual way to be in the world. Sure, the formation of character takes center stage, but just as much, the novel juggles the ideas people have about art, their impulses to define what art is and what it should do - art itself has successfully laughed of these attempts for millennia, and will continue to do so. But it is so-so-fun to join in the fun, to witness people grappling with what makes us human: Seeking ways to express and share our own consciousness, an ultimately futile endeavor that holds the power to produce beauty and the sublime. And Eggers beautifully connects these themes with the art of friendship: To novel starts with a quote by Georgia O'Keeffe: "To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."
And yes, Eggers takes his time telling his story, but I didn't find the pacing too slow, and his witty remarks and knowledge about the subject matter enhance the experience: Growing up, Eggers has dreamed of becoming an artist. While he majored in journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he also took art classes, and he does still work as a visual artist, with his own representation and gallery exhibits and even a show at the Nevada Museum of Art. On top of that, he has announced that he will run a tuition-free art school in San Francisco from January 2027 on (Art + Water).
Contrapposto is a term taken from the visual arts, describing a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot, so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips (you've seen this in statues, for example). This movement of center and weight is an aesthetic component within the story, which ebbs and flows, but never loses traction. The drawings contained in the physical book were crafted by the author.
Much, much better than Eggers' supposedly political work: I think I love novels about artists so much because they ponder the power humans hold to create beauty and share emotions. In times like these when everything seems fucked, they somehow remind me that we are not doomed. Not neccessarily, at least.
June 15, 2026
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.
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.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
'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.
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.
June 21, 2026
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
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
June 18, 2026
Loved the discussions about art, but something got lost in its episodic structure. The second half had little impact on me.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
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.
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.
May 29, 2026
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.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
April 13, 2026
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.
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.
June 10, 2026
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)
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)
June 13, 2026
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.
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.
May 11, 2026
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.
July 12, 2026
Portrait of the artist across six decades.
4.5 stars rounded up.
Who gets to decide what art is - and who gets to call themselves an artist?
Born into an abusive home in the Midwest, Robert Dibb - better known as Cricket - has little reason to believe his life will amount to much until he discovers that he can draw. Soon afterward, he meets Olympia Argyros: brilliant, charismatic, and already far more worldly than he is. She becomes his instigator, champion, collaborator, friend, and, at times, lover. Over the next six decades, their lives become inextricably entwined as they navigate art school, the ever-changing art world, and each other, all while searching for meaning in both art and life.
At its heart, Contrapposto is a riveting coming-of-age story that eventually becomes something much larger: an expansive, globe-spanning novel about friendship, creativity, ambition, and the ways our passions shape us over a lifetime. Through Cricket and Olympia, Dave Eggers repeatedly asks fascinating questions about our perception of art. Who decides what constitutes art? Who determines its value? And what, exactly, makes something "good"?
The title, contrapposto, refers to the classical artistic pose in which a figure stands with most of its weight on one foot, creating a subtle asymmetry and a sense of movement. It is a fitting title for a book so interested in the push and pull between love and friendship, idealism and practicality, and artistic integrity and commercial success.
Eggers' own artistic background shines throughout the novel. In addition to being an acclaimed author, he is also a trained painter whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States, and that firsthand knowledge gives the book a wonderful sense of authenticity. Art is not merely the backdrop here; it is the novel's essence. The novel's stunning cover features Eggers' own art, and the ebook even includes several of his drawings, a lovely touch that further blurs the line between creator and creation.
Despite its considerable scope, Contrapposto remains deeply human. The decades pass, countries change, relationships evolve, but the emotional core - the bond between Cricket and Olympia and their shared devotion to beauty and creation - never loses its pull.
Part coming-of-age story, part love story, and part exploration of art in all its forms, Contrapposto is as much about art as it is about the people who devote their lives to it. Like the artistic pose from which it takes its name, it's a novel built on tension and balance: between love and friendship, ambition and contentment, art and commerce. The result is a sweeping and deeply satisfying story about the beauty - and difficulty - of making a life in art, and about the enduring desire to create something meaningful and leave behind a mark, however small, on the world.
Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf for providing me with an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
"Contrapposto" was published on June 9, 2026, and is available now.
4.5 stars rounded up.
Who gets to decide what art is - and who gets to call themselves an artist?
Born into an abusive home in the Midwest, Robert Dibb - better known as Cricket - has little reason to believe his life will amount to much until he discovers that he can draw. Soon afterward, he meets Olympia Argyros: brilliant, charismatic, and already far more worldly than he is. She becomes his instigator, champion, collaborator, friend, and, at times, lover. Over the next six decades, their lives become inextricably entwined as they navigate art school, the ever-changing art world, and each other, all while searching for meaning in both art and life.
At its heart, Contrapposto is a riveting coming-of-age story that eventually becomes something much larger: an expansive, globe-spanning novel about friendship, creativity, ambition, and the ways our passions shape us over a lifetime. Through Cricket and Olympia, Dave Eggers repeatedly asks fascinating questions about our perception of art. Who decides what constitutes art? Who determines its value? And what, exactly, makes something "good"?
The title, contrapposto, refers to the classical artistic pose in which a figure stands with most of its weight on one foot, creating a subtle asymmetry and a sense of movement. It is a fitting title for a book so interested in the push and pull between love and friendship, idealism and practicality, and artistic integrity and commercial success.
Eggers' own artistic background shines throughout the novel. In addition to being an acclaimed author, he is also a trained painter whose work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States, and that firsthand knowledge gives the book a wonderful sense of authenticity. Art is not merely the backdrop here; it is the novel's essence. The novel's stunning cover features Eggers' own art, and the ebook even includes several of his drawings, a lovely touch that further blurs the line between creator and creation.
Despite its considerable scope, Contrapposto remains deeply human. The decades pass, countries change, relationships evolve, but the emotional core - the bond between Cricket and Olympia and their shared devotion to beauty and creation - never loses its pull.
Part coming-of-age story, part love story, and part exploration of art in all its forms, Contrapposto is as much about art as it is about the people who devote their lives to it. Like the artistic pose from which it takes its name, it's a novel built on tension and balance: between love and friendship, ambition and contentment, art and commerce. The result is a sweeping and deeply satisfying story about the beauty - and difficulty - of making a life in art, and about the enduring desire to create something meaningful and leave behind a mark, however small, on the world.
Many thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor | Knopf for providing me with an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
"Contrapposto" was published on June 9, 2026, and is available now.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
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.
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.
April 5, 2026
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.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion.
July 13, 2026
"Contrapposto" looks at the art world through its two key characters: Cricket and Pia. We first meet them when Cricket is 10 and Pia is 12. We follow them through the years, ending with them in their 70's. Cricket tells the story from his point of view.
Cricket is a shy, quiet boy who has to cope with his single mom's boyfriend, who is mean and physically abusive. From an early age, Cricket loves to draw and shows talent with his art. Even though it is not in his nature, when Cricket meets Pia, he allows her to talk him into drawing graffiti on a newly built playground. Echos of this reverberate through the years. As they grow, Cricket is the innocent one. Pia is more worldly wise and has a tendency to be outrageous, sometimes leading Cricket into dubious situations.
There are other key characters as well. Cricket meets Jed in his teens when they work together in a store after school. Jed becomes his best friend. Like Cricket, Jed has a problematic home life. Their employer is sensitive to this and acts paternally towards these boys. Another key character is Carpenter, a retired art professor. He runs a studio/school in his home which both Cricket and Jed attend while in college. Carpenter becomes their mentor.
Cricket has an affinity for drawing human figures. We learn about what it's like to work with nude models, especially for a young boy of 15. We also see Cricket's actual art work mixed in throughout the story (drawn by Eggers himself). For me, this is a special part of the book.
Cricket first falls in love with Pia as a boy. Through the years, Pia leads him on, but never commits. She thinks of herself as a libertine and has many boyfriends.
Across this human backdrop, there is a running debate about what art is.
*************************************
My Reactions:
I enjoyed the story, the characters and the debates about art. I thought the drawings were a wonderful addition to the novel.
I was unhappy with Cricket's and Pia's relationship. She did not treat him well. I wanted him to see that and to find love with another woman. Pia called her feelings for him love, but was it really love?
4.5 stars
Cricket is a shy, quiet boy who has to cope with his single mom's boyfriend, who is mean and physically abusive. From an early age, Cricket loves to draw and shows talent with his art. Even though it is not in his nature, when Cricket meets Pia, he allows her to talk him into drawing graffiti on a newly built playground. Echos of this reverberate through the years. As they grow, Cricket is the innocent one. Pia is more worldly wise and has a tendency to be outrageous, sometimes leading Cricket into dubious situations.
There are other key characters as well. Cricket meets Jed in his teens when they work together in a store after school. Jed becomes his best friend. Like Cricket, Jed has a problematic home life. Their employer is sensitive to this and acts paternally towards these boys. Another key character is Carpenter, a retired art professor. He runs a studio/school in his home which both Cricket and Jed attend while in college. Carpenter becomes their mentor.
Cricket has an affinity for drawing human figures. We learn about what it's like to work with nude models, especially for a young boy of 15. We also see Cricket's actual art work mixed in throughout the story (drawn by Eggers himself). For me, this is a special part of the book.
Cricket first falls in love with Pia as a boy. Through the years, Pia leads him on, but never commits. She thinks of herself as a libertine and has many boyfriends.
Across this human backdrop, there is a running debate about what art is.
*************************************
My Reactions:
I enjoyed the story, the characters and the debates about art. I thought the drawings were a wonderful addition to the novel.
I was unhappy with Cricket's and Pia's relationship. She did not treat him well. I wanted him to see that and to find love with another woman. Pia called her feelings for him love, but was it really love?
4.5 stars
Read
June 30, 2026I’m all over the place with my love for Dave Eggers’s books. When I love, I LOVE. And when I don’t, I really don’t. This was LOVE. Eggers is using his considerable skills and applying them to character and scope. He has his eyes on something bigger than what happens within these pages. Rob and Pia are completely alive to me, firstly in their youthful artistic ambitions and then in their hard-earned life experience. At first this book is asking what is art, but then it asks, what is life, what is friendship, what is love? And I’ll be damned if those aren’t the best questions for fiction to be asking.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
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.
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.
July 10, 2026
Magnificent. One of my favourite books of the year for sure. I found it so moving that once I finished it, I had to sit and have a cry for ten minutes.
June 16, 2026
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.
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.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 8, 2026
Eggers blends together a book about art, lifetime love, and aging in a subtly plotted, affectionately detailed novel. The narrative jumps a few years to key moments in the relationship of Cricket and Olympia--and the ways in which Eggers fills in for what we missed is so skillful. We get all of the most important things in these characters' lives, but also clues about relevant things we've missed. This creates a coherent, perfectly-paced love story between two people and the beauty in art that makes life joyful and worth all the pain.
June 30, 2026
Loved this book. Started reading Dave Eggers over 20 years ago in college with A Heartbreaking Work, kind of stopped following him for a while after What is the What (even though I really liked it), but this is a great book about art and friendship and aging. All themes I love.
Usually books that break the narrative and skip years ahead bother me, but I found myself looking forward to the jumps with this one, probably in part because it always picks up with Cricket.
Also Lily King has a blurb on the cover which is a promising sign for me.
Usually books that break the narrative and skip years ahead bother me, but I found myself looking forward to the jumps with this one, probably in part because it always picks up with Cricket.
Also Lily King has a blurb on the cover which is a promising sign for me.
June 20, 2026
as an art historian of modern and contemporary art, this really hit the spot.
June 15, 2026
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 “
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 “
June 12, 2026
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.
July 13, 2026
Lekkere roman die bij vlagen ontroert maar ook bij vlagen irriteert (makkelijk voorbeeld, de seksscènes: ze voelde zijn paraatheid en streelde zijn roede) en vooral, richting het einde, voelde het alsof Eggers het plot een beetje afraffelend samenvatte, alsof hij zich de personages niet meer goed kon voorstellen wanneer ze ouder waren dan hij. En dan nog Olympia, die nooit echt een mens werd, maar vooral een beetje een cynisch sekskonijn met goede smaak en ambitie. En toch heb ik me goed vermaakt.
June 14, 2026
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.
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.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
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.
Want to Read
March 30, 2026I 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.
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.
July 10, 2026
Contrapposto by Dave Eggers is a novel that will not leave me. Long after I finished it (two weeks ago) I found myself returning not so much to its plot as to the questions it poses. In many ways, this is a novel about art, but even more so about the people who make it and measure themselves by their ability to remain relevant in the art world.
Eggers explores what it means to be an artist with brilliant nuance. He asks whether truly great work can exist on its own merits or whether, in our culture of endless explanation, every work of art requires a carefully constructed narrative to justify its existence. He also examines the uncomfortable truth that extraordinary talent often inspires not admiration but envy—that artists can be as ruthless toward one another as they are devoted to their craft. As someone who teaches art, I found these observations especially relevant.
These ideas about art are woven beautifully into the lives of three people whose stories unfold with tenderness, humor, heartbreak, and an acute understanding of how lives are shaped as much by missed moments as by decisive ones. Even the most fleeting characters feel fully realized - no encounter is incidental, and each leaves an imprint on the narrative.
By the novel's end, the questions have expanded beyond art itself. How many times can a person truly reinvent themselves within a single lifetime? Are we continually becoming someone new, or are we simply revealing different sides of the selves we have always been? And does love endure across years of separation, patiently awaiting its moment, or does it demand courage at the instant it first arrives?
Contrapposto is a meditation on creativity, identity, time, and love, but never at the expense of story. I closed the book with the rare feeling that I had encountered something both deeply thoughtful and deeply human.
Eggers explores what it means to be an artist with brilliant nuance. He asks whether truly great work can exist on its own merits or whether, in our culture of endless explanation, every work of art requires a carefully constructed narrative to justify its existence. He also examines the uncomfortable truth that extraordinary talent often inspires not admiration but envy—that artists can be as ruthless toward one another as they are devoted to their craft. As someone who teaches art, I found these observations especially relevant.
These ideas about art are woven beautifully into the lives of three people whose stories unfold with tenderness, humor, heartbreak, and an acute understanding of how lives are shaped as much by missed moments as by decisive ones. Even the most fleeting characters feel fully realized - no encounter is incidental, and each leaves an imprint on the narrative.
By the novel's end, the questions have expanded beyond art itself. How many times can a person truly reinvent themselves within a single lifetime? Are we continually becoming someone new, or are we simply revealing different sides of the selves we have always been? And does love endure across years of separation, patiently awaiting its moment, or does it demand courage at the instant it first arrives?
Contrapposto is a meditation on creativity, identity, time, and love, but never at the expense of story. I closed the book with the rare feeling that I had encountered something both deeply thoughtful and deeply human.
July 10, 2026
It's not perfect, but it is wonderful. Lovely writing about art, and the artistic drive, and human nature, and humanity. And to be pulled back into compulsively reading a novel instead of doing all the other things demanding my attention -- what a gift and reminder of the value of reading novels as part of making me feel like myself.
"No one tells us! No one tells us that our spirits stay delightable, surpriseable, porous and tingling. Every year, Cricket felt more -- of everything -- and every year his eyes had only gotten better, younger, his aperture opening, opening, opening. Every years his eyes got younger, and he drew better, and he taught better and he saw this woman, saw everyone around him as his children, all of them innocent, and he loved them all equally and without reservation."
Wikipedia: Contrapposto, in the visual arts, is a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot, so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs in the axial plane....
First appearing in Ancient Greece in the early 5th century BCE, contrapposto is considered a crucial development in the history of Ancient Greek art (and, by extension, Western art), as it marks the first time in Western art that the human body is used to express a psychological disposition."
"No one tells us! No one tells us that our spirits stay delightable, surpriseable, porous and tingling. Every year, Cricket felt more -- of everything -- and every year his eyes had only gotten better, younger, his aperture opening, opening, opening. Every years his eyes got younger, and he drew better, and he taught better and he saw this woman, saw everyone around him as his children, all of them innocent, and he loved them all equally and without reservation."
Wikipedia: Contrapposto, in the visual arts, is a human figure standing with most of its weight on one foot, so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs in the axial plane....
First appearing in Ancient Greece in the early 5th century BCE, contrapposto is considered a crucial development in the history of Ancient Greek art (and, by extension, Western art), as it marks the first time in Western art that the human body is used to express a psychological disposition."
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