Navigating the Art World and Creative Joy

Hi, I'm Alyssa Advoni, and you're listening to NPR's Book of the Day. Dave Eggers has his first new adult novel out in five years. It's called Contraposto. It follows two artists, Cricket and Olympia as they navigate the art world . It spans many decades of intertwined friendship and love as they grapple with the meaning of art, growing up and who is actually considered an artist. Eggers talked with NPR's Elsa Chang about the book . Who gets to call themselves an artist? What even is art? These are just a couple of the questions driving a new novel by Dave Eggers called Contraposto. It's a story about a man named Cricket, his devotion to art, and his lifelong commitment to a woman who always remains just out of his reach. Olympia glides in and out of cricket's life , the two of them forever bonded by their mutual dedication to art , even as their love changes over time, even as they each carve their own path inside the art world, navigating its rules, hypocrisies , and power dynamics. Dave Eggers joins me now in person to talk about his new book. Welcome back to MPRS, Dave. Hey, that was really good. I was like, boy, that's a good description of the book. Put it on the back cover . But man , no, you always get it better than anybody else . Oh , I don't deserve that, but thank you so much. No, I so enjoyed this book, especially reading about friendship and love between cricket and Olympia. It's this story the way you tell it, it spans several decades in this book. But over the decades, what remains the same is they don't end up together, at least not in the conventional sense of coupled . Why is that? What keeps them apart? How would you characterize? Well, I think that he's for the most part ready to, even when there's eight and nine years old, he's ready to yeah, I'm all eight. Yeah, she is his sun and moon and he's ready to , you know, revolve around her forever and because she's so compelling, I think that she's just like such a force of n ature and so brilliant and also she sees things in him that he doesn't see and she wants things for him that he wouldn't ever imagine. And so maybe they're not in the right place at the right time in their lives , she's always maybe searching for something maybe a little more glittery than he is. I think. Yeah. He's a kid from rural Indiana that doesn't have any sort of glamour to him really. He's dependable. He's solid , he's steady, he loves her unconditionally, but maybe that's not enough for her. Right. Well, as cricket and Olympia's relationship with each other ebbs and flows over the years, so does their relationship to Art . And in this book, you explore the question, what does it even mean to be an artist? How do you think Cricut and Olympia answer that question differently, even though they are both arguably committed to art . Yeah. Well, I think that it's a central question because cricket has more sort of natural talent as a draftsperson, as a painter . Olympia knows the landscape of the business of art inside and out. Very comfortable. This is just water that she feels very comfortable swimming in. And he never gets comfortable that way . So there's a part where she has a show for him and puts on a show in a gallery and it just becomes this like incredibly nightmarish experience for him. He's so uncomfortable. But because there are so many little compromises even to put on that show in a small gallery in a town like Chicago . And so I thought he was interesting to explore just because I think we all know those folks that are like maybe the most talented musician you've ever known has never played outside their garage because they just can't get through the thicket of , you know, all of the industry the industry part y. Yeah , and you know, the personal relationships and managing all that stuff. And also visual art is really unique in that to really make it make a living, often you're selling very expensive works to a very few people. It can get very elitist and exclusive . With a book, everybody can afford the book at twenty eight dollars and it's very egalitarian and democratized. Visual art for the most part is like, well, here's my hundred thousand dollars painting. If I make six of these a year, I can make a living and send my kids to school. So's it still got to fit in somebody's particular room in their particular mansion. Yeah, it has to match the couch and the accent wall there it's really weird and I still love it. I still draw on paint all the time and I show my work in a very small galler y and we do our thing and try to make it affordable and prints and stuff like that. But to really on a certain scale that Olympia is on, it is really a different that's unlike any other. I mean, Olympia seems to have made peace with aspects of the art world that cricket disdains, like the industrial complex of it all, the gallery openings, the marketing, the elitism . And you mentioned you're a visual artist fact, yous includ, ined many of your sk ownetches in this book, is cricket's jadedness a closer reflection of your own experience in the art world? Is that a little bit of you on seeing this? No, you know, I'm a little bit I've never really had to struggle with the discomfort of the scale of like there's an artist in the book named Kyle that really is at the top of the pyramid. But he's so burdened by so many obligations and lawsuits and hundreds staff members and he's becomes a manager instead of exactly. He's just a coordinator and orchestrator. Yeah, and you know you think that that's what you want. And if you can handle it, then that's great. But he's so far away, though, from the process of making . I know. And I think sometimes you find yourself lost. You don't even know where that original place of happiness was, you know ? And so I have a more balanced kind of mellow relationship to it than I think cricket and Olympia are struggling with. That is what I'm ultimately so curious about with respect to you because you talk about how you be an artist while being content while, living and building just a life . So how do you do it Dave Eggers? Like how do you hold on to the simple joy of creation even as the industrial complex threatens to challenge that joy? How do you hang on to the simple happiness of creation? Well, I think the book world is really unique in that it is by nature like a much calmer place, let's say. You get to write alone. I ride on a boat under the Golden Gate Bridge and I'm just sitting alone with Yeah. And when it's rough, it's I get used to it, but you know, so I figured, okay, that's a good place to work. And then when you have, you know, all the people in the book world are kind of like there for bachelor quote, they're for the right reasons. And so I like to quote the bachelor every time . But you know, it's it's a very calm place and so everyone is really, you know, devoted to books and then you get to share this one object, you know , with each reader and it's a really intimate one on one relationship. And so when you get to meet the readers as you travel around , it's such a beautiful kind of symbiosis. Like we don't exist without them. And they share, you know, a reader is a participant. They're the cinematographer and narrator of your book really. So you want to know how they felt about it and what they added to it or got out of it . And so and then there aren't the equivalent really of these like pretentious openings in New York or wherever where people aren't necessarily there for the work, but for some other reason. So book launched parties are not as inseferable . Well , I actually do avoid book launch parties. I haven't done one of those in twenty five years. So there are certain things you do start ruling out as you get older, you're like, You know what? I really don't enjoy that part of this, so I'm going to exercise that. You curate, so to speak. You curate Dave Eggers' new book is called Contraposto. Thank you so much Dave for coming into MPR West again and sharing this time with me. I'm so grateful. Thank you