‘Contrapposto’ is one of those art-historical terms that occasionally surface outside the discourse. It describes a way of standing. One leg is straight, one slightly crooked at the knee; the hips tilt a little this way, the shoulders a little that. Two statues of Dave Eggers’s biblical namesake show how versatile it can be: Donatello’s in bronze, from the 1440s, is epicene and voluptuous; Michelangelo’s in marble, from fifty-something years later, is grimly businesslike. In each case, it’s the marginal details – a feather tickling a thigh; a sling slung over a shoulder – as much as the disposition of limbs and other body parts that provide the key to the work. In Netherlandish Mannerist art from the later 16th century, the device is carried to extremes, sometimes suggesting an orthopaedic deformity, sometimes foreshadowing such maximalist acts of self-fashioning as Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ video or Tom Wolfe’s notorious ‘pimp roll’.

Contrapposto, then, announces on its title page that it has something to do with art and something to do with bodies, and maybe carries a suggestion of a single being divided, of one body in dialogue, and maybe at odds, with itself. At heart, it’s a love story. On a wooden bridge across a creek in a quintessential small Midwestern town, a schoolboy, Rob – known as Cricket because of his involuntary habit of making clicking noises in his mouth and to differentiate him from his hated stepfather, Robert – cutely meets the slightly older Olympia, whose name is shortened in a number of ways, as in the opening dithyramb of Lolita. It’s about 1970. Cricket’s prowess at drawing and lettering are known at school, and Olympia persuades him to inscribe a series of obscene phrases on the pristine timbers of what we would call an adventure playground. Scandal ensues – as it will again in a few years when he starts attending a life-drawing class in Chicago and submits a series of nudes for display in his local library. 

Over the next six decades their paths cross intermittently. They resolve to start an art movement, but are dismayed by the predominance of conceptual art over the ‘real’ kind at their unnamed state university, which Olympia disparagingly refers to as ‘cow college’ (she’s had to leave Bard after one of