Books in the Media: Dave Eggers' latest is 'deeply satisfying'
Writing in the Times, John Self found much to admire in the latest novel from the prolific Dave Eggers, Contrapposto (Canongate), declaring it “one of his good ones”.
It follows a young boy – Cricket – who loves to draw, partly as a distraction from his mother’s horrible boyfriend: “The presentation of this relationship is exemplary: enough of the ugly stuff for us to understand, but not overdone, and more touching for its lack of sentimentality”, wrote Self.
Cricket grows up to become an artist while sustaining a lifelong friendship with Olympia: “The way they fall back into one another’s lives as the decades pass, knowing one another as nobody else really does, is deeply satisfying”. It is a novel “about the magic of finding a purpose in life, something many of us never do” observed Self, finding that Contrapposto “has the generosity and scope of imperial-phase John Irving” with “shades of David Szalay’s Flesh… and the unusual way the book ends is particularly impressive.”
In an interview with Dave Eggers in The Bookseller, Madeleine Feeny described Contrapposto as “an ode to art-making, as well as a satirical indictment of the often-joyless apparatus that surrounds it” and an “open-hearted celebration of a longstanding friendship that evolves through life’s twists”.
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Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan (S&S), a chronicle of the US president’s second term, has created quite a stir across the broadsheets. In a review for the Financial Times, Edward Luce described Regime Change, written by two White House correspondents for the New York Times, as “deeply reported and gripping” and “replete” with “telling detail”. Martin Pengelly in the Guardian also reported on the extraordinary findings in Regime Change, as did Katy Balls, writing in the Sunday Times.
On Thin Ice: An Explorer’s Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival by Charlie Walker (Duckworth) was reviewed in the Spectator by Sara Wheeler. In early 2022, the explorer-author set out to hike 600 miles across the frozen rivers of Siberia. Wheeler found Walker to be “an immensely likeable companion, he crucially doesn’t take himself too seriously, and although he says that for periods ‘the quiet simplicity of the wilderness was bewitching’, the experience he conveys in these enjoyable pages is essentially a long scream of very cold anguish.”
But things take a dark turn when Russia invades Ukraine. “The emotional heart of On Thin Ice lies in people’s reaction to the unfolding catastrophe of war” writes Wheeler, and then the author is arrested and imprisoned by the Russian authorities. “The book reads like a thriller. What a gripping film it would make,” she concludes.
