Contrapposto by Dave Eggers review – this portrait of an artist falls flat

Dave Eggers, the author of more than a dozen novels as well as a steady stream of children’s and nonfiction books, grew up wanting to be an artist.As a child he took lessons with a Japanese watercolourist, studied painting at college, worked as a magazine cartoonist and illustrator, even curated a New York show entitled Lots of Things Like This featuring pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Marcel Duchamp. He is soon to open a project in San Francisco that he has been hatching for a decade – Art + Water, an amalgam of art school, affordable studios, exhibition galleries and local gathering point.

Cricket Dibb, the cloyingly named hero of Contrapposto, would love a place like Art + Water. He’s 10 years old, a working-class midwestern kid who passes raccoons and broken tractors on his way to school. His stepfather, Robert, thinks nothing of beating his mother, calling her “a gimpy whore”, stealing any money she’s saved. Cricket hates him, not least on aesthetic grounds – “his ugly gold watch, his mouth full of black fillings, his bony bald head, his pockmarked face, his tiny black eyes”. Cricket’s life is erratic, his future unpromising. His grandfather, though, spots him drawing: “You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, order on your paper.”

Someone else who sees something in Cricket is Olympia Argyros. They bond after she gets him to write euphemisms for masturbation at a park playground, and calls him her “partner-in-crime”. She’s a touch older, worldly and self-confident. As a teenager, she has a musician boyfriend, access to money, reads DH Lawrence, hates Ayn Rand, thinks she’s Albert Camus. Why doesn’t Cricket escape with her to France, she asks. They should create a movement like the Neue Sachlichkeit – “it could arise from the shattered hopes of a maligned generation”. She may be crazy; he’s certainly crazy about her. Years skitter by, ups and downs: wherever he goes, she shows up – a goad, an egger-on, a dispenser of handjobs. Perhaps his destiny?

Autodidacts and strivers – their sincerity and dreaming, their gaucherie and stumbles – tend to make for comic and touching material. From Dalí to Norman Rockwell, Cricket gobbles up any catalogues or art history books he can find. His studies of the Renaissance teach him lessons both pragmatic (real artists don’t wear glasses) and worrying (does he have any future if he’s not apprenticed to a master artist by the time he’s 12?). Olympia champions exuberance, self-expression, rule-flouting; he, by temperament and (Eggers suggests) by class, is drawn to accuracy and fidelity. An artist may not be groundbreaking but, he wonders, “just to get it right – wasn’t that something in and of itself?”

These types of issues flare up again at art college, where a skateboarder called Sharon is criticised for being a “skilled illustrator” and “all technique and no courage”. Scene after scene reads like hoary art-school satire. Callow youths (those who believe they’re “interrogating” rather than merely painting) come up against a maverick professor who declaims “Beauty needs no justification!”, “These kids don’t know how to stretch a canvas”, “The talented have talent. The untalented have theories.”

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. (“Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.”) Dyer was wilfully OTT and funny; Eggers – when he gets his academic to lament that professors are “forced to talk, which leads to pronouncements, which leads to theories, and theories become rigid and quickly ridiculous” – merely sounds as if he’s pronouncing, theorising, being rigid.

Contrapposto spans decades and continents. Cricket’s best friend, Jed, joins the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and is sent to serve in Iraq. Olympia bounces around Sharjah and Madrid and Greenland, racking up addictions and life-threatening illnesses. Art-world associates, painted, like most of the novel’s characters, with the broadest of brushstrokes, come to grisly ends. Cricket himself is nearly killed in a ship-boiler explosion off the coast of Turkey and has a violent encounter with a Parisian pavement. At one stage he reflects on how he and Olympia have “hacked through miles of interpersonal jungles and crawled over the broken glass of a dozen tortuous romances and were finally ready for the glorious calm and doubtless love they could give one another. But she wanted more broken glass.”

It’s hard not to compare such passages – unfavourably – with those to be found in the pages of an issue of The People’s Friend. Or to read a love­making scene set in a shower (“The water tapped his shoulders, swept down her tummy, pooled where their pelvises met, and as she sped up the water sparked and leapt and he died a hundred times”) without sighing that the Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award has been discontinued. Cricket’s favourite professor declares, “You have been fed the lie that explaining your ideas is the same as realising them.” Both pious and shrill, Contrapposto falls for the lie.