DAVE EGGERS HAS answered to many titles during his celebrated career—author, editor, philanthropist, Pulitzer Prize finalist—but there’s one that’s easy to overlook: Midwesterner. As Eggers detailed in his name-making memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he grew up in Illinois and attended that state’s flagship university. Eggers has rarely addressed this literary heritage. (“We all know the ‘Midwest’ is ten miles outside of any city,” he wrote in his memoir.) But that makes it only more interesting that his new novel spends its first 200 pages right here in Indiana.
In Contrapposto, which has received praised from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, Eggers traces the life and art of Cricket Dib—a Hoosier with a talent for drawing and an everlasting crush on Olympia, his cosmopolitan classmate. Contrapposto is an easy but rich read. From the start, when Cricket is only 10, Eggers shows that children know and notice far more than adults realize.
Cricket’s world is classically Midwestern. He lives in Northern Indiana, more than 10 miles outside of Chicago, since locals take the train into the city. His (single) mother balances public politeness with a privately jagged wit. His grandfather lives in their basement, reading library castoffs about transportation disasters and giving Cricket the things he needs most: attention and time. Cricket’s hometown is so flat that the berm in a new subdivision passes as high ground. He dodges teenagers in cars, yelling unprintable insults; he frequents that local library, a portal to the wider world—even as the librarians seem uncomfortable around nude paintings, including the ones rendered by Renaissance greats. Eggers describes it all with perfect details and quietly beautiful prose. Cricket comes of age, he writes, in “the creamy blur of late winter Indiana.”
Contrapposto is 2026’s latest example of Northern Indiana getting some pop culture love. There’s “Gary,” the standout standalone episode from the television series, The Bear. There’s Michael, the musical biopic about Gary’s most famous son. Forget poaching Chicago’s other bears—maybe it’s time to sink some taxpayer dollars into a Northern Indiana arts district.
And yet, eventually, Cricket must leave Indiana, and Eggers’ novel follows along with layovers in New York and Paris and Thailand. The characters in Contrapposto launch into wonderful, unsolvable debates about art—about pomo cuteness versus noble realism, a debate that’s worth applying to Eggers’ own evolution, particularly the shift from Heartbreaking Work to his later novels, including this one. But the best thing about Contrapposto is the characters themselves: their emotions, their shortcomings, their humanity, their love. Eggers has written the perfect summer read for anyone who knows why Cricket left Indiana—or why a part of him wanted to stay.
