Contrapposto by Dave Eggers

Published by Knopf on ‎ June 9, 2026

What is art? In Madison, Wisconsin during the 1970s, a fellow named Art supported himself by washing windows for sympathetic merchants on State Street. Someone had the idea to make a poster with a picture of Art at work. At the top appeared the words: “WHAT IS ART?” And at the bottom: “ART IS A WINDOW WASHER.” The poster seemed profound when I was young. It still does.

Dave Eggers examines the definition of art from various perspectives in Contrapposto. Told in six parts, the novel follows the life of Rob “Cricket” Dibb from the age of 9 to 74. Cricket’s father moved away when Cricket was 5 and was never heard from again. As the novel opens, Cricket lives with his mother and Silas, his 80-year-old grandfather, in northwest Indiana.

Cricket began making art when Silas showed him a book of Manet’s paintings and took note of Cricket’s ability to observe details that others fail to notice. When Cricket is trying to avoid his mother’s abusive boyfriend, Silas encourages him to make art so he can “have the life you can conjure on your own. You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, order on your paper.” This becomes the defining theme of Cricket’s life.

A girl named Pia, having heard that Cricket is good at drawing, enlists him to place masturbation-themed graffiti on a new play structure in a park. Pia insists that the lettering must be ornate, teaching Cricket that precision is “the essence of art.” They stay in touch for a time after Pia moves away, but eventually end their communication.

At 15, Cricket takes a drawing class from a Romanian woman whose sister teaches piano. One of her students is Pia, who now goes by her full name, Olympia. They resume a friendship, with the added element of Olympia rubbing Cricket’s crotch until he makes a mess. Cricket immediately falls in love. He holds that feeling for the rest of his life.

Cricket takes a job at a train station convenience store where he befriends co-worker Jed. Their boss, Roulin, assumes the role of surrogate father to them both. Using his savings, Cricket signs up for a class in figure drawing. He’s rather surprised to find himself sketching nude men and women. A librarian offers to display his drawings in a reading room where art books are shelved, but the plan goes awry when Indiana townies compare him to Mapplethorpe, who was widely condemned in small town America for drawing men who don’t hide their dicks.

Cricket learns a couple of trades and has no plan to attend college until Olympia comes back into his life and persuades him to join her in the art program of an Indiana cow college. On his first day, he attends a session in which students critique the work of other students, debating whether something is or isn’t art. The tend to praise the obscure and to trash beautiful, technically proficient creations as failing to break new ground.

Cricket doesn’t intellectualize the process of creation. To Cricket, recognizing, capturing, and creating beauty is the point of art. Whether others choose to define those creations as art — or as valuable — is beside the point.

Cricket’s brief college experience proves to be fruitful only because he meets an art professor who becomes a lifelong mentor. Marcus Carpenter is much on the outs with the college because he complains that “the art world, in the last century, has made room for those who cannot draw” and asks his students to “resist a new, paradoxical tyranny wherein those without technical skill terrorize those who possess it.”

The rest of Cricket’s life is shaped by Carpenter, Jed, Roulin, and Olympia. His life periodically intersects with Olympia’s, once while working in an art factory owned by Kyle, a fellow student of the cow college who, despite his lack of artistic ability, becomes wealthy by exploiting artists who know how to create beauty. As their lives move on, Cricket and Olympia repeatedly encounter each other in locations from New York to Cambodia to Paris. Their moments together are wrapped in pure delight. Sharing their connection is a delight for the reader.

The novel’s first half is very funny. In troubled times, laughter is therapeutic. I prescribe Contrapposto as an antidote to the real world. I also recommend it because the second half morphs into a meaningful and moving glimpse of the intersection between art and life. The story is sweet without becoming saccharine. That distinction is incredibly difficult for writers to pull off, but Eggers delivers a masterclass in how to tell a story that is alternately uplifting and tragic without ever coming across as forced or artificial.

So what is art? One answer, suggested late in the story, is that art is the product of joyful creation. That answer is suggested in the negative, from the lack of joy involved in the production of art for money. Kyle and those who work for him are not joyful; they are “all engaged in a kind of factory that made beautiful, unnecessary things that meant very little to anyone who made them.”

But successful novels must be based on something more than philosophy. Ultimately, Contrapposto is the story of enduring friendship. Cricket and Olympia are friends with benefits, two people who love each other but know they can never be together for extended periods, much less a lifetime. Their relationship works because it works. They find no need to analyze its unconventional nature or to compare each other to other people they have loved or shagged. In that respect, their friendship is almost a form of art, a kind of beauty that exists because they envision its existence.

If Contrapposto has a lesson, it is the importance of living a life with joy. Of Cricket, when he’s 57: “A thousand times in his long life he had felt so happy he could die, and this was another.” Many of those times are the moments he has spent with Olympia, but he also finds joy in tiling a floor and in drawing or painting, even if he’s knocking off a copy of a Pissarro for a few hundred bucks.

The tension between Cricket and Olympia as they consider Cricket’s life gives the story its soul. In a roundabout way, Cricket’s life teaches a cliché: money won’t buy happiness. The cliché might not be true for Olympia, but as long as he can eat and has a place to sleep, Cricket is happy enough without money. Olympia and Cricket fight from time to time about the commercialization of art, as Olympia argues that artists need to eat while Cricket fears that mixing business with art replaces the joy of creation with the stress of production. Perhaps a man with Cricket’s talent could do more with his life, but would that make him more content?

I won’t reveal how Cricket resolves this tension — that is, what Cricket is doing with his life at 74 — but, to me at least, the resolution is both honest and satisfying. Cricket still has a friend in his 70s who was like a father to him at 15. Many other friends have died along the way and Cricket wonders why he has not yet joined them, but he still finds joy in life. Perhaps being content is the key to longevity. If not, it might at least be the key to living a life that feels right. I was moved by Cricket’s late-life epiphany: “No one tells us that our spirits stay delightable, surpriseable, porous and tingling.” What more could any of us ask?

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