Review: In a culture that commodifies everything, Dave Eggers' latest makes room for artistic bliss
This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.
Book ReviewContrapposto By Dave Eggers Knopf: 432 pages, $32If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.What does it mean to lack ambition in a country that worships wealth? It means you are a capitalist wallflower, a laggard with a serious character flaw.No field of endeavor is immune from this attitude, the art world least of all.
But artists with a desire for riches and fame must not declare their intentions so brazenly.At a time when the plastic arts are about as marginalized as they ever have been, and media buzz is generated by dead painters whose works sell for enormous sums at auction, creation in and of itself has little value unless it is lashed to something marketable.With his new novel “Contrapposto”, Dave Eggers has written a big-hearted, deeply moving story about the choices artists make, or don’t make, to square up their own notions of success and happiness.
The book is dual bildungsroman, following two friends across the long span of their lives from adolescence to their 70s, as they fall in and out of each other’s lives, make their way in the world, and fumble around for meaning and purpose in their art.The protagonist in “Contrapposto” is Rob “Cricket” Dibb, an underclass Midwestern kid, raised by a single mother in a North Indiana suburb that’s about as nowheresville as it gets for budding artists with dreams of glory.Cricket doesn’t dream big.
He’s just trying to endure without bodily harm, seeking refuge from his mother’s abusive boyfriend in the basement with his grandfather Silas, who teaches him about jazz and the beauty of a glorious sunset.He draws so he doesn’t have to think.
Immersion in art is his escape hatch from the dreariness of his pinched world: “The drawing meant nothing, would never mean anything to anyone, but it was true to how...