David Eggers returns with a novel two decades in the making: CONTRAPPOSTO by Dave Eggers,
CONTRAPPOSTO by Dave Eggers (Canongate £20, 432pp)
The title of Eggers’s doorstopper, Italian for ‘counterpoise’, does double work here. It’s a reference to the poses of the models that Midwestern-born Cricket, a gifted artist, draws (‘his’/Eggers’s sketches are reproduced throughout).
And it’s a reference to his ying-yang, on-off relationship with Olympia, a restless curator-cum-patron, for whose fireworks the self-contained Cricket provides the foil over the course of more than 60 years.
This novel was two decades in the making, and it’s hard not to feel that its vitality got sapped somewhere along the way.
Cricket’s modest career has its highs and lows, but his constant yearning for Olympia is not permitted to ignite into grand passion.
Interspersed with the longueurs is something entertaining and moving that also probes (not always subtly) the nature and business of art. But like the plains from which Cricket hails, it struggles for elevation.
LONG WAVE by Daisy Johnson (Jonathan Cape £18.99, 288pp)
Johnson is no longer the youngest author ever to be nominated for the Booker – she was usurped by 20-year-old Leila Mottley in 2022 – but for a writer still only in her mid-30s, her evocative, dream-hazed style is becoming hard to mistake.
A river runs through this, her third novel, its passage ending in the sea and the uninhabited island to which teenager Ruth longs to escape. As it is, Ruth is a prisoner of her mother, locked in her own bedroom when she falls pregnant.
Years later, Ori, Ruth’s child, is a new mother herself, slowly sinking beneath the surface of postnatal depression and grappling with Ruth’s sudden, unexplained disappearance.
Moving fluidly between the generations, the currents of Johnson’s plot draw the reader along, her characters searching for connection and the signal amongst the noise.
THE FIRST HOUSE by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton £16.99, 240pp)
Burnt Sugar, Doshi’s Booker and Women’s Prize-nominated debut, was the caustic tale of a toxic mother-daughter relationship. Here, the focus is on a married couple, although it’s a marriage that ends on the first page of this unsettling novel when our unnamed narrator’s husband announces their 13-year union is over.
The cicadas whose arrival the narrator’s neighbourhood awaits provide an analogy for her evolution: like them, she must split apart and find a new form, reassessing as she does the bargains and sacrifices she made previously simply to feel safe.
Despite the confessional tone, the reader sometimes feels like a bystander to the emotional intensity, and the narrative can feel disjointed. However, Doshi also rivals Rachel Cusk and Eleanor Ferrante in her unsparing, forensic analysis.