Eggers's Contrapposto Stages Rebellion Without Risk
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- Dave Eggers's new novel "Contrapposto" follows two characters, Cricket and Olympia, who embody competing visions of the artistic life: pure solitary creative devotion versus fluency in the art world's systems of prestige and patronage.
- Eggers first gained prominence with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a Pulitzer finalist whose fourth-wall-breaking, self-aware tone anticipated a culture where the boundary between reality and fiction would grow porous.
- A 2004 New York Times profile called Eggers "the magnetic center of a literary counterestablishment," citing moves like printing the first page of his novel on the cover and releasing it only through independent bookstores and McSweeney's.
- A 2013 Gawker essay by Tom Scocca branded Eggers a prime example of "smarm"—the unearned, hypocritical positivity worse than snark—and declared him "full of shit."
- Beyond writing, Eggers founded McSweeney's publishing, The Believer magazine, the education nonprofit 826 National, and a scholarship program for first-generation college students—parallel institutions that embody Olympia's vision of art sustained by systems.
- The review argues "Contrapposto" stages rebellion while rarely risking any of its own, treating Olympia as a "manic pixie dream girl" with no interior life and granting full humanity only to Cricket, the lone-artist rebel.
Why it matters: Eggers spent two decades building institutions—McSweeney's, 826 National, a first-generation scholarship fund—that prove Olympia's worldview about art needing supportive systems. By denying Olympia inner life in the very novel dramatizing her position, "Contrapposto" undermines the argument it claims to make, revealing that even Eggers gravitates toward the rebel archetype he's spent a career complicating.
