For the epigraph of CONTRAPPOSTO, Dave Eggers chooses Georgia O’Keeffe’s introduction to the world of art: To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. Here are two threads in his new novel: becoming an artist by learning to see, and becoming a friend through understanding and seeing the larger world.

Cricket Dib is a loner who is coming into adolescence. His only friend is Silas, his grandfather, who lives in the basement and provides a partial shield from Bob, the abusive jerk who lives upstairs with Cricket’s mother. Cricket is talented. His sketches are quirky and accurate, and they draw some quiet recognition in an art class.

"CONTRAPPOSTO is layered with rich, surprising details of the artist’s life, beautiful sketches from his notebooks, and an understated tenderness as Cricket becomes Cricket."

A chance moment on a small bridge that Cricket needs to cross introduces him to Olympia Argyros, who is a year older than him and a millennium more aware. She and her friend give enormous magic markers to Cricket and instruct him to draw obscene graffiti on the newly constructed jungle gym at the playground, which he does. Her praise for his work and her being so glad that she ran into him causes “his soul to overflow with liquid love, viscous and golden.” Their friendship will be uneven and sporadic over the course of Cricket’s life, but the golden love will be permanent.

Cricket’s first art lesson happens soon after with Oana, a Romanian who lives with her sister a few blocks away. She sets a bowl of fruit on the table and starts with broad sweeping strokes above the paper, and then she begins to touch the brush to paint and paper. He mimics her movements cautiously, copying her careful choice of color and accenting, and a banana appears. He is encouraged and begins painting a tower of grapes, grateful that there are so many of them.

Cricket realizes that the inept music student taking lessons from Oana’s sister is Olympia, and they walk home some afternoons. She admires Cricket’s paintings with a knowing eye. After being in his home for a bit, she has a diabolical idea about revealing Bob as the weasel he is. It is perfect, and he wins a blue ribbon.

Carpenter, a former art teacher at the university Cricket is attending, provides new lessons. At an art showing of student work, he appears and surprises Cricket by eviscerating the common praise and usual standards of the class. Cricket believes that he agrees with him and spends another segment of his life painting with him in his atelier in an Indiana cornfield.

Carpenter takes Cricket and another student to a reservoir craft show one afternoon. They walk among the booths, frames and fabrics flapping in the wind. They see beer steins, baskets and belts made of leather. Carpenter asks: What is art? What is not art? What is craft? He fields their earnest responses, rolling his eyes, giving them confidence and uncertainty. He buys them corn dogs and asks more questions.

CONTRAPPOSTO is layered with rich, surprising details of the artist’s life, beautiful sketches from his notebooks, and an understated tenderness as Cricket becomes Cricket. It was important to Cricket --- and to me --- that Olympia appears again and again, always different but always the same. Dave Eggers has taken O’Keeffe’s epigraph to heart. He teaches us about seeing, and he understands about friendship.