CONTRAPPOSTO, Dave Eggers' long-time-coming novel of art, friendship, and artists being friends

CONTRAPPOSTO
DAVE EGGERS
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Cricket is just a shy kid who likes drawing when he first meets Olympia. She's older, more confident; she bullies him into some light vandalism and instantly he's in love. When they're together, they talk about their futures, how they're going to travel the world, the beauty and rapture of art.

Then those futures start to arrive in unexpected ways, the years and decades pile up between them, the art world seduces and disappoints and frustrates them. And they have to figure out, again and again, what it is to be an artist, and who and what to love.

This is a wild and beautiful novel about two friends who believe they can change the world, if only they can start their own movement, dodge charlatans, remain open-eyed and open-hearted, avoid going mad, avoid dying young of rare cancers, stay true to their ideals and never tire of beauty. Not easy, but not impossible, either.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Contrapposto" is first used as an English art-vocabulary word loaned to us by the Italians in 1903. (I love etymonline.com!) As the MCs in this story are artistic types, it's the appropriate term to reach for:

"Contrapposto is an Italian term translating to 'counterpose.' It describes a natural, relaxed pose in which a human figure’s weight shifts onto one foot. This shift causes the shoulders and hips to tilt in opposite directions, creating a gentle, dynamic S-curve along the spine."

I myownself kept thinking in terms of the centuries-older borrowing of "counterpoise" with its weight and its mass as Pia/Olympia and Robert/"Cricket" level each other out, one on the up when the other's weighed down. Their connection begins when they're quite young with all the ridiculous grandiosity of young idealistic artsy-fartsy kids, determined to Show The World without knowing yet what the world bothers to look at.

I thought, based on the publisher's description, I was in for a revamp of Author Eggers' memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, of which I was not fond. I had a similarly not-positive response to What is the What. I then really, really liked Zeitoun, and have missed his other work; when offered this DRC it felt right to get in the swing of modern Eggers. I hoped more Zeitouny fun would be had; it was.

Stylistically, Eggers has moved himself into a groove that affords us the pithiest and most aperçu-worthy prose that is down the middle of the public's strike zone. The story of two people whose connection forms and reforms over many years as they each grown into life-shapes strongly influenced by each other, by their artsy-fartsy lives...pursued in part so as to impress and please the other...and ultimately by the certainty that, no matter what, they belong in tension, harmony, response, connection to each other. Some friendships just *are*. If they just *are* they can feel closer than family, and that's the friendship Pia and Cricket have from the get-go. The issue I take with that, even though it matches my own lived experience of some rare friendships, is that here it comes across a bit like "manic pixie dream girl" tropishness from the Aughties. Pia zooming unattainably into and out of Cricket's life, always on to something new something wild someone else not him, leading him (almost but never fully leading him on) into or out of trouble...it's heartfelt, feels real enough, but really is not free of the tinge of the trope.

As a sly comment on the male expectations of our time, as a sneering smirk at the people who make up the elite in the artworld, this is a fine little story. It's very quotable. I stopped at one because much as I liked many of them, they all, when assembled, seemes repetitious of point. I didn't notice it as I read and marked them. I call that a vote of confidence on my readerly part; especially since I wasn't consciously aware of it until writing this review.

Way to sneak one over on me! I'm very impressed. A full four stars for a story that felt until just now like three-and-a-half; decent-to-good, not great. I think this sly story will win many hearts and tap on the glass of many a mind in the Zoo of Life. It should. It deserves your time and your treasure.

On sale, though.

MINOR BLACK FIGURES: A Novel, latest from Booker finalist Brandon Taylor

MINOR BLACK FIGURES: A Novel
BRANDON TAYLOR
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

One of Electric Literature’s Best Novels of 2025!

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Booker Prize finalist and bestselling a perceptive novel about a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity

A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It’s challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist’s block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make – in art and in life.

As he did so adeptly in Booker finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings to life in Minor Black Figures a fascinating set of characters, this time in the competitive art world, and the lives they lead with each and on their own. Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of friendship, creativity, and the connections between them.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A Black, queer iteration of My Dinner with Andre. That means I loved it, if you're wondering.

Wyeth and Keating are talking machines, and since I was interested and involved in what they were talking about, I was very gruntled indeed. I can imagine that, if you're not interested in two people connecting to each other with ideas about Life, Culture, and maleness, you'll be bored stiff.

Keating, being white, does not see...and more importantly, does not see that he does not see...important truths about being Black. I've whacked into that wall more than once. If you have too, apologize to your Black friend immediately, and hope they care enough about you to educate you. That is the most generous gift I have ever received, being shown how my on blinkered perceptions are not reality for anyone but me. (Thank you, Rob, thank you Nicole, y'all are excellent teachers.)

I was slightly nonplussed by the use of third person narration in such a Wyeth-centered story, and filled with many omniscient descriptions of Wyeth's thoughts...I get that it's like Louis Malle's camera from the films, but the point of a novel feels different than the point of a film. No matter. I think the ideas in the book, the conversations these men navigate, the channels they create with their flowing words, are fun and fascinating.

They won't be to people seeking action, events, or even simple changes in the characters...they are themselves, they don't so much alter as reshape their borders and boundaries to fit up against the other's more comfortably.

Are you, like me, in the early-winter mode of contemplation, of examination, of making sense of this wild and precious life we're (mostly) wasting? Here's us a book.

Recommended because it is exactly what it says it is, a rare gift in the literary world of hyperbole.

BARRY LANCET'S PAGE: JAPANTOWN & TOKYO KILL, first two of his Jim Brodie series

JAPANTOWN
BARRY LANCET (Jim Brodie #1)
Simon & Schuster
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this “sophisticated international thriller” (The New York Times Book Review), an American antiques-dealer-turned-reluctant-private-eye must use his knowledge of Japanese culture to unravel a major murder in San Francisco—before he and his daughter become targets themselves.

San Francisco antiques dealer Jim Brodie receives a call one night from a friend at the SFPD: an entire family has been senselessly gunned down in the Japantown neighborhood of the bustling city. As an American born and raised in Japan and part-owner of his father’s Tokyo private investigation firm, Brodie has advised the local police in the past, but the near-perfect murders in Japantown are like nothing he’s ever encountered.

With his array of Asian contacts and fluency in Japanese, Brodie follows leads gathered from a shadow powerbroker, a renegade Japanese detective, and the elusive tycoon at the center of the Japantown murders along a trail that takes him from the crime scene in California to terrorized citizens and informants in Japan. Step by step, he unravels a web of intrigue stretching back centuries and unearths a deadly secret that threatens not only his life but also the lives of his entire circle of family and friends.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh dear. I'm really Over the "Asians are naturally master assassins" trope. It's a whole star off. The parts about being trained and the family inheritance of the skills...well, I'm gonna say it: "1984 wants its tropes back." I could hear "Mr. Roboto" playing in the background.

Then I realized the book is ten years old, and it makes more sense. 2014 is culturally closer to the 1980s than the 2020s are. And please can we retire forever the "grieving for dead wife fuels badassery" trope? It's called fridging nowadays and it plays poorly in 2024. I myownself never liked it because women aren't solely victims which is the message this trope sends.

So, well, since you hated it why'd you review it? is forming on your mental lips. I didn't hate it. I was very intrigued by Brodie's multicultural upbringing and his proficient code-switching from sleuth to art-world wheeler-dealer; from US to Japanese norms; from loving dad to vengeful rageball. Author Lancet manages all these transitions without making me, a skeptic towards the majority of Brodie's identities, feel like I've got whiplash. An excellent talent, that. A man whose self contains such a wide latitude is a hard creation.

Layers of connection within the story, threads of identities intertwining among the threads of action aren't quite so convincing. Why are we hopping between first-person cinematic view and limited third person? An omniscient narrator doesn't blend well in between first and third person narration, true; but when we're moving between limited PoVs we need to know eventually who the third person is, or it feels like the writer took the easy way out. That diminishes the real impact of the first-person narrator's effortfully built solidity in the reader's imagination.

I'm not honestly able, then, to get past three and a half stars in what would ordinarily have been a more than four-star read. I'll go on to the next on slightly wary but willing to be there.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



TOKYO KILL
BARRY LANCET (Jim Brodie #2)
Simon & Schuster
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In the second thriller of this new series from “a fresh voice in crime fiction” (Kirkus Reviews), antiques dealer-turned-P.I. Jim Brodie matches wits with an elusive group of killers chasing a long-lost treasure that has a dangerous history.

When an elderly World War II veteran shows up unannounced at Brodie Security begging for protection, the staff thinks he’s just a paranoid old man. He offers up a story connected to the war and to Chinese Triads operating in present-day Tokyo, insisting that he and his few surviving army buddies are in danger.

Fresh off his involvement in solving San Francisco’s Japantown murders, antiques dealer Jim Brodie had returned to Tokyo for some R&R, and to hunt down a rare ink painting by the legendary Japanese Zen master Sengai for one of his clients—not to take on another case with his late father’s P.I. firm. But out of respect for the old soldier, Brodie agrees to provide a security detail, thinking it’ll be an easy job and end when the man comes to his senses.

Instead, an unexpected, brutal murder rocks Brodie and his crew, sending them deep into the realm of the Triads, Chinese spies, kendo warriors, and an elusive group of killers whose treachery spans centuries—and who will stop at nothing to complete their mission.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh great...Japanese assassin dynasty first, now Chinese triads.

Not my favorite transition. Nor is the grafting on of the seemingly inescapable "love interest," a woman (natch) to help Our Hero forget the wife he lost before book one began. I'm not as forgiving the second time out. The same "Asian assassin dynasty is invincible until white guy raised in their culture comes along to show 'em how it's done because because they killed his wumman" stuff that turned me off of James Bond happens here.

Do better. This crud's tired and so am I. Though I admit the artistic bit of the series interests me, it felt totally unintegrated into the story this time; permaybehaps the miasma of heterosexuality, always disagreeable to me, got in my way.

Wharever; I'm out.

IN TONGUES, among other things, a coming(!)-of-age story perfect for the Fire Island beach

IN TONGUES
THOMAS GRATTAN
MCD Books
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 37TH Lambda Literary Awards for Gay Fiction.

The Publisher Says: A young gay man upends the lives of a powerful art-world couple in this steamy novel of self-discovery.

It’s 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon―handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction―takes a bus from Minnesota to New York City because it’s the only place for a young gay man to go. As he begins to settle into the city’s punishing rhythm, he gets a job walking rich Manhattanites’ dogs. But it isn’t until he stumbles into the West Village brownstone of two of his clients, the powerful gallery owners Phillip and Nicola, that Gordon learns how much the world has hidden from him―and what he’s capable of doing in order to get it for himself.

A lush, heart-quickening novel about family and art, sex and class, and the terror of self-discovery, Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues chronicles Gordon’s perilous pursuit of belonging from the Midwest to New York and, later, to Europe and Mexico City. As he floats further into Phillip and Nicola’s exclusive universe, and as lines blur between employee, muse, lover, and mentor, Gordon’s charm, manipulation, and growing ambition begin to escape his own control, in turn threatening to unravel the lives, and lies, of those around him.

Anchored by winsome lyricism, glinting intellect, and a main character whose yearnings and mistakes come to feel like our own, In Tongues crackles with fierce longing and pointed emotion, further confirming Grattan as a rare chronicler of young adulthood’s joys and devastations.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I kept making dirty wordplay on this title as my review's first line. Trouble with that is nothing I can come (!) up (!) with is steamier or hornier than the book itself is.

This is NOT straight-people safe. This is not, in all honesty, a book to read at work, or on public transport, unless you're wearing very, very loosely pleated trousers. Or baiting your hook.

It's also not one-handed reading, I hasten to add. The story is very much the point of the sexual situations, not the other way around. Think of it as Ripley made for PornHub not Netflix, nor perish forbid that neutered but pretty-to-look-at theatrical film. That perhaps overplays the calculation and manipulation that Gordon commits to in achieving his goal of finding himself (between two powerful people's bodies), and discovering his true inner self(ish bastard). But make no mistake that Gordon is very much a Young Man from the Provinces who very clearly knows what he left behind he deliberately rejected. Now he needs to understand how to work his natural gifts while he's got youth and a complete absence of the will to say "no" on his side.

The reason I resonated so deep(!)ly to the story is Author Grattan's way of making it: Episodic, dreamlike, in the flow. That knocked off the meaner interpretations I leapt to about Gordon's thoughtlessness, his lack of a core concern for how his behavior might affect others. It is not yet in him (!) to be calculating. It is, in other words, a case of his being canny versus being savvy. Gordon instinctively responds to the way others see him and shows them that side. A savvy operator would, instead move to seduce those who have what he wants. Those people are often false-feeling and mistrusted, Gordon is too real in his desire to be desired to give off a warning signal, a fake vibe.

Absence of an organizing principle often gets mistaken for aimlessness. Author Grattan takes on a daunting task of presenting the story of Gordon, void of course, and needing thus to use authorial sleight of hand to keep his reader from feeling lost and unconnected the way Gordon is. That is a supremely difficult thing to do. For the most part I think his choice of sexual contexts serves admirably to ground and connect us to Gordon. There's so much pleasure in reading the elegant prose of the story, and so much about the emotional nature of those around Gordon to keep a lit-fic reader going. Particularly telling is Gordon's relations with the old guys in the story. He might not lust after them as they do him, but he desires...something, some meaningful intangible benefit to go with the tangible exchanges between them; does he get it? He doesn't know, because he doesn't know what he's looking for, The older men get what they want though likely not what they need, which is again intangible: connection. A future. Raising more than a flagging half-staff, shall we say.

This is consonant with my own life.

My half-star docked off dissatisfaction was Gordon's religious father begging for his son's withdrawn love. That's not so baldly expressed, of course, as I've done but it honestly does not ring true at all. Religious fathers with gay sons imght want to convert them to straightness but making themselves emotionally vulnerable? Nope. I don't, honestly, see that happening between most any father and son. And that joined a certain vague sense I could never coalesce around an actual idea, that Gordon was not really interested in himself enough to attract the caliber of men he does. That's as close as I can come to articulating a kind-of Forrest Gumpishness about him that did not jibe with narrative.

Lovely writing made the ending work. Lesser talent would've fumbled that one, and it was a close-run thing even so. A book I recommend to gay-male readers of literary prose.

All others, at your own risk.

JANEY by Richard Matturo on sale now! 4-star review

JANEY
RICHARD MATTURO
Livingston Press
$9.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Twelve Labors of Hercules might seem an easier task than warming up to someone as caustic and misanthropic as Janey. If you hate her at the beginning, though, be warned: by the end you may very well fall in love with her.

Richard Matturro (author of four previous novels: Leslie, Luna, Perseus, and Troy) is a native of Rye, New York. He holds a doctorate in English with a specialization in Shakespeare and Greek Mythology. After sixteen years at the Albany Times Union, he now teaches literature in the English Department at the University of Albany, and lives on an old farm in the foothills of the Berkshires.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: Author Matturro wrote three previous novels that were takes on classical subjects, and now gives us misery-guts Janey Heracles, a sculptress (she'd smack me one for saying that) and a general all-around Pain In The Ass of a woman. For those Louise Penny fans out there, think Louise Penny's deathless old-lady-with-a-tude Ruth Zardo before menopause calmed her caustic wit down.

No, no lie not kidding not exaggerating. Serious.

Janey's Twelve Labors are nothing short of reinventing herself in her late forties. She's got a great gallery show to prepare a piece for, but to navigate her way to that Promised Land, she must unload her literal and metaphorical baggage: Sell the empty hotel her dead parents left to her and her conventional, estrangedish sister Laura; empty the said hotel of its Augean Stables-level hoarded crap; cope with her husband divorcing her; cope with a new man, DJ Bugs Mudge, bringing his gray-ponytail-having gerontological tantric sex and laid-backness into her life; cope with Stanley the Evil Gay Imp in whose adjacent studio to hers he makes paintings of naked boys that bring him, well, something he wants...but not enough to keep him from renaming himself Stanislav. Which Janey, with her usual People Person attitude, ignores and calls him, at every opportunity, Stanley.

I found the author's breaking the book into twelve two-chapter segments named after the Twelve Labors of myth a wee bit forced, but I think for many it might be a useful way of calling attention to the point of the book: Janey is, like her namesake, laboring mightily (if in her case more than a little unwillingly and for no clearly defined purpose) to master and contain her own power, her self-transformation, her life.

In a “review” of Janey's sculpture Pillars, created for her big gallery show, author Matturro sums up Janey's journey, and a fundamental insight into human nature and life results:

The Ionic column is polished smooth and gleaming white. The Doric is discolored, stained, chipped, and pockmarked, the object of a thousand injuries and indignities. Worse, there's a diagonal crack that threatens at any moment to split it in two. ...these are the dual natures we all share after a certain age. That ideal, upright pillar we wish we were, and that damaged, blemished old post that we are. And yet one is as necessary as the other for our “life support.”

...Art indeed may not change anything, and yet on some very basic level, life is insupportable without it.

(p183, softcover edition)
A very nicely phrased way to say something that, as readers, I suspect we all agree with; and as good a summation of the reasons one would want to read this novel as any I can write. I recommend the book to your readerly mercies.