Can art save lives?

Dave Eggers, the acclaimed author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," has written a new novel. It’s the Ink Book Club's July selection

Dave Eggers is one of those remarkable literary citizens who is as well known for his philanthropy, mentorship, and fierce protection of artists’ rights as for his work as an author. His tenderhearted epic, Contrapposto — which the New York Times praised as “a bildungsroman and a novel of ideas, exploring the meaning of art and the unfairness, pretensions and occasional skullduggery of the art world” — is also a love story that unfolds over the course of more than six decades. It’s the Ink Book Club’s July selection, and Dave Eggers will be our guest twice during the month: On Wednesday, July 8 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, and then again on Wednesday, July 29th.

We chose Contrapposto because it’s an enthralling coming-of-age novel which wrestles with childhood trauma; with being fatherless; with not-quite-requited love; and with whether art can save a life. As readers of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius will recall, Eggers’ 2000 memoir chronicled his harrowing and hilarious experience raising his 8-year-old brother, Toph, after both their parents died of cancer when Eggers was just twenty-one. The book became a cultural phenomenon and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Contrapposto mines some of that territory. Cricket, the novel’s main character, has a loving mother who is barely capable of parenting him. From a young age, he is mainly left to his own devices. After his grandfather—his only confidante and protector, dies—he takes refuge in drawing. Eventually Cricket teams up with two other young eccentrics, Olympia and Jed—also semi-orphans--who push Cricket to become more of a rule-breaker and free thinker, as an artist and a human. They’re like Peter Pan’s lost boys or characters straight out of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. They are each other’s found family, finding surrogate fathers in a store owner who employs them, or an art professor who takes them under his wing. Olympia crashes in and out of Cricket’s life in dramatic fashion over the course of decades—a love he is unable to fully claim, or to shake. She’s brainy, beautiful, ambitious, unstable, and drawn to men who inevitably mistreat her–except for Cricket. While Olympia ultimately embraces the art world and, in between breakdowns and flameouts, becomes embedded in it, Cricket fights to retain his artistic integrity by remaining outside it.

Eggers is not merely a novelist or memoirist—which would be enough! His explosive literary debut became the means through which he’s constructed a purposeful life: “Feeling useful as a writer,” he’s said, “is not an everyday occurrence. You can spend eighteen months, two years…on writing something that you don’t know if it’s going to come to anything, but you can be sent into a middle school” (as he’s done with his non-profit, 826), “and feel like in two hours, boy, you really have an impact.”

When we sit down with Eggers on July 8, we’ll discuss the parallels between Cricket and his creator, as we know, for one, Eggers is also a visual artist whose drawings are featured throughout the book. Cricket dreams of becoming an artist’s apprentice; Eggers co-founded a San Francisco non-profit visual arts school and cultural hub called Art + Water, where aspiring artists are offered free studio space and mentorship. We will also touch on the status of book bans around the country; how Eggers helps combat San Francisco’s affordability crisis; why he launched his independent publishing company, McSweeney’s, as well as 826 National, a network of youth writing centers.

Meantime, below are some questions to contemplate: