Eggers has written a big-hearted, deeply moving story ... As Contapposto arrives at its beautiful, life-affirming conclusion, we are left pondering the significance of artistic endeavor in a world that commodifies everything, including our bodies and brains ... A brilliant novel.
What a relief to be able to recommend the new Dave Eggers novel (almost!) without reservation ... An earthy, warm return to form and norm ... It is a bildungsroman and a novel of ideas, exploring the meaning of art and the unfairness, pretensions and occasional skulduggery of the art world ... Also a romance of epic and goopy proportions ... Is there anything this children’s-book-writing, nonprofit-overseeing, magazine-founding Gen X-er can’t do?
Eggers, whose early work was celebrated for formal daring, has written a surprisingly traditional tale about the conflict between passion and the organizations that help give it shape—a book that stages rebellion while rarely risking much rebellion of its own ... Contrapposto stakes its drama on a genuine contest between two visions of the artistic life, yet it grants full humanity to only one of the contestants ... Yet Contrapposto excels as a study of the development of an artist ... A book that makes a case for artistic freedom while repeatedly reaching for inherited forms ... The writing is quite pleasurable in parts, and the conclusion is genuinely moving. But it is not a work of staggering genius.
Fundamentally a love story, and, as in the graceful asymmetry of its titular technique, there is loveliness in the union of two complementary opposites. Yet I couldn’t help but want a more radical alternative than the retreat to tradition that the novel offers as an antidote to late-capitalist art.
A novel firmly ensconced in the Dave Eggers extended universe. It is sympathetic to the alienated, the estranged and the vulnerable (migrants, young people). Its central protagonists are pure of heart and noble in intent, while its antagonists are never entirely irredeemable (nor do they hang around for long). It is written in gently ironising but never mean-spirited prose ... Contrapposto is, unashamedly, an old-fashioned novel about creativity ... It’s also a novel about the compromises necessary to sustain an artistic career — the need for patronage, the role of the marketplace — and whether they can ever be worthwhile ... Where I used to find the sentimental humanism of the Eggerswalt slightly mawkish, I now feel a sort of avuncular fondness for it. Contrapposto may not be a great novel — it’s too measured, the plot too smooth, the prose too lubricated by sentiment, for that. But it is a good one.
Comic and touching ... There are echoes here of Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s anti-biography of another working-class writer-artist, DH Lawrence, which featured a gleefully narked setpiece attacking academic criticism ... Dyer was wilfully OTT and funny; Eggers merely sounds as if he’s pronouncing, theorising, being rigid. ... Both pious and shrill, Contrapposto falls for the lie.
Rob, known as Cricket to his friends, is just nine years old when he meets Olympia ... He is instantly smitten by the force of her personality ... Over the next six decades, they intermittently drift in and out of each other’s lives ... The novel’s only motive force is time itself: as the years tumble by, Cricket is ever on hand to comfort Olympia amid her various life struggles – addiction issues, divorce, illness – with a martyr’s devotion. His constancy is admirable, and depressing ... This appeal to unpretentious decency panders to the prejudices of the middlebrow reader. Conveniently, it doubles as a defence of Eggers’s fiction – of the cosy, lulling cadences of his prose, which feels redolent of children’s fables even when dealing with adult themes; of the saccharine, fortune-cookie sentimentalism in his evocation of modest contentment.
A profoundly earnest, funny, and sexy read, one that wears its considerably-sized heart on its sleeve ... Characters are more vivid than life, their heroic qualities and flaws ablaze ... Visual art is notoriously difficult to articulate, but Eggers has not only done it, he’s also coupled it with the other impossible-to-express thing that is pure, unabashed feeling. The result fills us with wonder.
Surpassingly beautiful and enthralling prose ... An insightful, caustically funny, at times tragic, and truly profound inquiry into the making and meaning of art.
A satisfying work that spans six decades in the life of a man for whom art is a consuming passion, but success proves elusive ... A couple of minor characters border on cliche ... Subtle and expressive. Fans of intelligent novels about art are in for a treat.
This is an Eggers novel, with some of his usual heavy-handedness ... When Eggers sticks to his main characters, though, the book achieves the simple beauty Cricket himself strives for. A winningly detailed art-world story.
