One of the most anticipated books of the year, Dave Eggers’ new novel Contrapposto was twenty years in the making and draws on the author’s own background as a trained visual artist before he turned primarily toward writing.
When Cricket meets Olympia, he is only nine years old. The introverted son of a single mother who has recently lost his beloved grandfather, he struggles as he is made to endure his mother’s string of terrible live-in boyfriends. Cricket is adrift, until Olympia arrives in his life like a supernova. For the next six decades the two orbit each other, coming together, drifting apart, and always showing up when it counts.
I’ll confess: I am not a big reader of coming-of-age stories. Underage protagonists leave me restless, and so I almost put this down in the early pages. Reader, I did not put it down. And by the end I was completely undone, which tells you everything about how necessary those opening sections turned out to be. Eggers knew exactly what he was doing. The novel is said to have been two decades in the making, and the author explained in an interview that he’d always wanted to write a book about a lifelong friendship between a man and a woman.
Some people are comparing this novel to Sally Rooney’s work, and I understand why — the intimacy, the emotional precision, the will-they-won’t-they haze that hangs over a decades-long friendship. But for me the closer comparison is Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. And not just because of the fierce, complicated loyalty between its two central figures, or the romantic feelings that never quite resolve themselves. It’s because both novels use the world of art (or gaming in Zevin’s case) as the lens through which we enter into the consciousness of the characters.
Cricket is a gifted draftsman and painter. His drawing skills are old school. Technically brilliant, he is the kind of artist who could have apprenticed under a Renaissance master and thrived. Indeed, that is exactly what he daydreams about doing. In contrast, Olympia is something more of an art curator and philosopher. She is ferociously ambitious where Cricket is almost aggressively not so. That contrast — talent without ambition versus ambition that sometimes outruns talent — is one of the most fascinating things Eggers has ever put on the page. But it is also, I think, the novel’s deepest provocation. Because underneath that contrast lives a question that haunts contemporary life far beyond the art world: are talent, skill and excellence enough? And the answer the novel keeps returning to, with increasing clarity, is: not anymore.
Talent must now be marketed, networked, monetized, leveraged. Cricket seems almost allergic to every one of these requirements. And Eggers uses this to hold a mirror up to the world we have made. Reading Contrapposto, I repeatedly found myself thinking of Byung-Chul Han’s influential account of contemporary achievement culture in his 2015 book, The Burnout Society. Work harder, hustle smarter, build your brand, leverage your network: the pressure is everywhere and it is total. What makes it so insidious, is that nobody is forcing us. We are doing it to ourselves.
Where older societies operated through prohibition (you must not, you should not), ours operates through seduction: you can, you should, you are capable of so much more. We have internalized the imperative so completely that resistance to it looks not like political dissent but like personal failure. We live in a culture of relentless self-optimization. Depression, burnout, anxiety: these are not signs that the system is broken. They are signs that it is working exactly as designed, extracting maximum performance until the machine gives out.
Cricket is Han’s argument made flesh. He will not perform his talent. He will not hustle himself into visibility. He paints because he loves painting, not because of what painting might get him. And in a culture organized entirely around what things might get you, this is nearly incomprehensible. Olympia finds his passivity maddening. And yet it is she, not Cricket, who most visibly pays the price: ground down by the relentless demands of a world she has chosen to navigate entirely on its own terms.
The novel is also a kind of history of Western art over the last half century. Cricket’s training begins the classical way: drawing from live nude models while barely a teenager, he is seen building hard skills the way a musician practices scales. Cricket has that kind of old school excellence. And then the art world changes around him. By the time they reach university, conceptual art has arrived and drawing well makes you look like a craftsman rather than a thinker. Cricket leaves. Olympia stays and thrives, attaching herself first to a famous conceptual artist, then to a finance man who sees art as investment. Eggers depicts all of this without sentimentality, and without entirely condemning it either. The novel’s most electric moment might be Olympia’s rebuke of Cricket’s purism, when she says: “Wealthy people make things possible. The opera. The symphony. Every painting in the Art Institute is there because of wealthy people.”
This shift from classical draftsmanship to conceptual art is not merely an aesthetic history. It is a class story. Classical training requires time, mentorship, materials, patience and a teacher willing to give years to a student who may never be famous. Conceptual art rewards ideas, provocation, connections and the ability to perform intellectual confidence in rooms full of people with the power to anoint you. These are different economies with entirely different gatekeepers. Cricket belongs to the first economy. He has no entry point into the second. And the novel quietly insists that what is lost in the transition is not just a style but a whole relationship between artist, work, patron and time.
Which brings us to the distinction at the heart of the novel, one that Eggers never quite names but everywhere implies: the difference between patronage and financialization. Cricket harbors a fantasy — half romantic, half genuinely serious — of traveling to Europe, finding a mentor, working within the old guild structure where a painter’s development was supported by a patron who believed in the cultural value of the work itself rather than its market value. This is not mere nostalgia. It points to something real that has been lost.
The Medici funded Botticelli not primarily as an investment vehicle but as a form of political, cultural, and spiritual self-fashioning. The relationship was unequal, often exploitative, shot through with politics, but it was structured around the belief that great art required time, protection and faith. Financialization is something different entirely. When art becomes an asset class, the question is not “what does this work mean?” but “what will this work be worth?” The finance man who appears in Olympia’s life is not a patron in any meaningful sense. He is a collector . And the distinction, in Eggers’ hands, is devastating.
Yet what makes Contrapposto more than a novel of ideas is that Eggers never loses sight of the relationship at its center. At a moment when friendship is often treated as secondary to romance, marriage, or career, Contrapposto insists on its centrality. The novel’s deepest commitment is not to artistic success but to the idea that another person can become a witness to one’s entire life. That proposition feels increasingly radical in an age of mobility, precarity, and perpetual reinvention.
This deep and abiding love they have for each other is something reflected in the novel’s title, Contrapposto. The term, rooted in ancient Greek and Renaissance sculpture, describes the artful imbalance of having a figure resting all of his weight on only one leg, torso twisting slightly, one shoulder dropped. This posture, rendering the figure seemingly in motion, makes the sculpture come alive.
Eggers, who studied pictorial art as a young man and has included his own drawings throughout the novel, shows a deep understanding of this posture. In one of the final drawings, we see two figures drawn tangled in each other’s bodies in just this way. This seems emblematic of the two characters and the way their lives are inevitably enmeshed together, from the age of nine until they are well into old age, in their seventies.
Contrapposto spans the globe from New York to Thailand, Indiana to Paris, and follows Cricket and Olympia through sickness and health, through the art world’s transformation, through decades of loving each other in whatever way they can manage. It is a big, generous, deeply felt novel about what it costs to have talent, what it costs not to use it, and what it means to have one person in your life who holds your heart in their hands.
What does Contrapposto ultimately reveal about the world we now live in? Perhaps this: that we have built a culture which can no longer see Cricket coming. We have optimized for Olympia, for hustle, strategy, self-promotion, the leveraging of talent into brand. And in doing so we have made it nearly impossible to sustain the kind of slow, difficult, uncommercial artistic life that has historically produced the works we now call masterpieces. And the friendship that survives all of it, one that outlasts every art world fashion, every financial arrangement, every failure of ambition, is Eggers’ quiet argument that some things cannot be monetized. Not because they are precious. Because they are real.
This is Eggers’ first book for adults in five years. A true cause for celebration, it feels like a masterpiece.
