Vital, exhilarating ... Dederer has been pondering these questions for years ... Although Dederer has done her homework, her style is breezy and confessional ... Monsters leaves us with Dederer’s passionate commitment to the artists whose work most matters to her, and a framework to address these questions about the artists who matter most to us.
Excellent ... Dederer is frank about how her own experience shaped her encounters with art ... Every critic has their own biases, their own blind spots, and ignoring them does not erase them. In criticism, as in memoir, the only way to work through these biases is to admit them—if not to others, at least to oneself. The value of the kind of criticism that Dederer practices, one that publicly acknowledges her own subjectivity, her own loves and hatreds, is that it makes the difficulty of this process visible.
What made for a compelling essay at that moment makes for an even better book. In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Dederer doesn’t arrive at some neat conclusion, because there are no easy answers to the vexing questions she wrangles with ... Dederer...just keeps getting better and smarter. In Monsters, she ties herself in intellectual and emotional knots, poking holes in her own arguments with gusto. In contrast to so many nonfiction books adapted from articles, Monsters doesn’t stretch a singular thesis over several hundred pages. Quite the contrary, it’s absolutely exhilarating to read the work of someone so willing to crumple up her own argument like a piece of paper, throw it away and start anew. She’s constantly challenging her own assumptions, more than willing to find flaws in her own thinking.
The book enables her to expand her purview, but it also leads to some repetition and extraneous byways ... Ms. Dederer’s stock in trade are questions without definitive answers ... Unwilling to renounce such work, she makes a thoughtful, nuanced case for subjectivity. She acknowledges the artist’s malfeasance but she does not explore it deeply. Nor does she erase the artistic accomplishment. No boycotts or cancel culture here ... The voice she ultimately developed and deploys here is conversational, clear and bold without being strident ... Ms. Dederer artfully combines memoir with criticism. She carefully locates herself in Monsters ... Not all of Ms. Dederer’s examples hit home ... In this age of moral policing, Ms. Dederer’s instincts to approach such material with an open mind—and heart—are laudable.
I hope that Dederer herself doesn't turn out to be a monster because I flat-out admire her book and want to share it with my students. As a thinker, Dederer is smart, informed, nuanced and very funny ... Maybe you can hear in those quotes how alive Dederer's own critical language is. She also frequently flings open the door of the stuffy seminar room, so to speak, to take her readers along on field trips.
The field of criticism claims objective standards that remove the emotional response of the critic from its evaluation. Dederer begins to take apart these claims to objectivity by teasing out the connections between art and its creator and the connections between the critic and their own subjectivity ... It's not clear whether Dederer comes to redeem traditional criticism or bury it. There are moments when she lays out a line of argument only to seek to invalidate it with questions left unanswered. The nature of a dilemma is that any answer will be unsatisfactory. Thus the question of how to respond to art created by problematic creators can only be answered by the vagaries of the individual human heart.
Exhilarating, gnarly ... The impulse to farm out the decision to an external authority sounds hopelessly naive – but then, asks Dederer, isn’t there something equally ridiculous about thinking that whether we choose to enjoy a particular piece of art or not is going to change anything?
The pragmatist in me suspects the answer to these conundrums is simply acknowledging human complexity: Caravaggio was a murderer; bad humans can be great artists. Dederer thinks it’s impossible to make that separation anymore ... Despite a pretty deep dive into some mildewed gender binaries, Dederer wants to avoid being a scoldy feminist cop. Yet her wariness of the preening virtue-mongering of the moment clashes with her wish to honor her moral intuitions, no matter how inconsistent. The outcome is a book frequently divided against itself. One of Dederer’s charming or annoying writerly traits is the habit of acknowledging that an argument is shaky ... Much of the time I spent reading Monsters, I was writhing in discomfort at what I suppose could be called the female condition—and at how many of its strictures seem so self-inflicted ... These gender binaries themselves further hardened by Dederer’s curation of examples: Obvious male culprits are perp-walked through the pages, while obvious female culprits seem to get shielded ... Dederer is at her best on such complicities—her own fondness for assholes, our cultural fascination with monsters—and less convincing when in a dudgeon, or deploying her feelings and experiences as intellectual credentials.
In an era full of reputational and textual revisions, Dederer’s book comes across as sane and nuanced — even refreshingly brave ... This is no dry compendium of intellectual arguments about artistic meaning, but rather an emotional journey through audience experience told with engaging chattiness from an insider’s perspective ... Although at times this approach makes for a self-absorbed read, the indirectness also helps to pacify the reader’s inner dogmatist ... In terms of structure, Dederer’s book meanders as feelings do, sometimes harshly censorious about the flaws of artists such as Allen and Polanski, sometimes worrying obsessively about the ethics of adoring their creations, and at other times shaking off anxieties in favour of a commitment to what the heart wants in spite of itself ... There is no real exploration of the thrill of transgression in art or artists ... After wandering about pleasantly for most of the book, there is a jarringly neat attempt to tie up loose ends in the final section ... Generally, though, the message of the book is a helpful one: if you love a piece of art, set it free from your inner moral critic, and just enjoy it.
Carefully argued, densely nuanced essays examining her own conflicted emotional and intellectual responses to consuming art created by people she knows have harmed others ... Her final assessment may be contingent but, given the slipperiness of the human condition, it could hardly have been otherwise.
Monsters sustains an essayistic, sometimes aphoristic tone throughout 250-odd pages. Dotted with details of her particular milieu — the ferryboat, the crepe shop, the rock show that leaves glitter in the eyelashes — Monsters is part memoir, part treatise and all treat. Dederer is continually trying — not in the adjectival sense, but as the present participle: showing us her thought process, correcting as she goes and experimenting with different forms ... Her exquisitely reasoned vindication of Lolita brought tears of gratitude to my eyes. But I also found myself disagreeing with or questioning a lot, resisting her sweeping 'we' ...For an author who rightly shudders over the cheapening of the word 'obsessed' to use the phrases 'make work' — the new 'make love'? — and 'late capitalism' leaves me feeling, as Dederer would herself put it, 'a little urpy.' But, but … this is a book that looks boldly down the cliff at the roiling waters below and jumps right in, splashes around playfully, isn’t afraid to get wet. How refreshing.
This is a good subject, and a perennial one...and Dederer certainly talks a big game as she begins. Her approach will be nuanced, she suggests ... Though she never fully articulates it, the reader senses her particular anxiety: an apprehension that has to do with what people...are going to think of her now ... Dederer has seemingly spent years working on Monsters and yet it is so thin, so ill-researched and, frequently, so crude ... The feeling grows that she doesn’t know what she’s doing ... When she moves on to female artists, including Joni Mitchell and Doris Lessing, things get even worse.
Brilliant ... Monsters centers on a question that’s both timely and trite: Can you—should you—separate art from the artist? ... Sorting out your feelings about an artist is a personal, and deeply intimate, undertaking. It means drawing your own emotional, nonsensical, moveable lines in the sand. It also means paying attention to the way a work art makes you feel, and accepting that these feelings can, and likely will, change. You can’t help what moves or repels you, what draws or disturbs you, be it certain aesthetic choices or certain pieces of extratextual information.
A needless expansion: one that retreads some familiar ground...and introduces some newer, though somehow still stale, lines of inquiry ... I liked Dederer’s original essay when it was first published in those early days of the Trump administration ... Dederer’s book feels very much of this time—2017, that is ... A chapter on motherhood and artmaking is interesting but feels similarly limited to what the conversation was within the early Trump years ... By the book’s end, Dederer having backed herself into a corner, throws up her hands and turns to that familiar canard: there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism ... This may be true, but it’s an unsatisfying conclusion, one that feels irresponsible in a book that raises what it views as provocative questions ... By focusing so much on biography when discussing certain artists and their works, at the expense of engagement with the work itself, Dederer ends up smudging her own critical lens ... I think that, while well-intentioned, Dederer’s conclusion flattens various types of 'monstrous' behaviors and viewpoints in such a way as to create a kind of malaise in the reader, an ultimately depoliticized approach to art that, as it claims to be political, robs both the audience and the artist of any kind of ability to protest.
Dederer weaves her experiences as a working writer, mother, and teacher, writing what she calls, 'an autobiography of the audience' ... Her essay on alcoholism, redemption, and the midcentury short story writer Raymond Carver displays the rewards of this autobiographical approach ... It’s her very ability to empathize with monstrousness — to recognize that we are all equally capable of behaving badly — that pushes her final arguments toward an apolitical, amoral nihilism ... Dederer’s rejection of agency here does a disservice to her book, which is intelligently nuanced even if I disagreed with it frequently. To collapse categories of privilege and agency in the face of capitalism is to pretend that a person of privilege doesn’t have agency at all ... Maybe, as Dederer suggests, our debates about moral relationship to art must be fought on the rocky terrain of individual feeling. But I sincerely hope they don’t end there before making bigger, more collective leaps in the name of accountability and repair, harm reduction and change. To believe this is possible, however, you also have to believe that the actions you take in a rigged system matter — even if they only matter to you.
The book feels simultaneously like having the deepest, artiest conversation with the smartest people you know and like having an intense shit-talking session with your closest friends ... This is exactly what Dederer knows: That the problem doesn’t have a good answer and a bad answer. There are just two equally inadequate answers, and you—we—have to decide which one it’s possible to accept.
The latest entry in a new meta-genre: the moral reckoning with the moral reckoning that is cancel culture ... Dederer ventures into this minefield with a divided soul. On the one hand, she has no sympathy for the men being accused ... On the other hand, she believes in art. In a clever conceit that lets her avoid appearing to criticize anyone—quite a feat in a book on this topic—Dederer keeps the conversation inside her head: She pits Claire the critic...against Claire the woman ... Like the good critic she is...she is drawn to paradox ... Giving herself permission to mix in this subjective and emotional reaction, as opposed to striving for a purely objective and rational one, is a liberation ... Given her visceral aversion to overreach, I find it surprising that Dederer often fails to question assumptions of culpability ... Dederer's ultimate recommendation for dealing with immorality in artists is very sensible.
Most books have opinions. The author has made up her mind, and now she will share them with you. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma shows opinions happening in real time ... Monsters is a pushback, and others will follow.
Dederer, however, does not achieve her goal. I’m not sure how she has spent the past five years, but it is hard to imagine she spent much of it researching this book. Dederer includes some interesting, though mostly well known, biography (did you know Richard Wagner was anti-Semitic?), and a little equally well-trodden interpretation (did you know that Humbert Humbert is an antihero?), but if you’re looking for a book that actually engages with the logic of 'cancellation,' this isn’t it.
The book is tangled and fascinating, chasing down arguments and questions that can’t always be easily resolved. Dederer’s shrewd, vivid descriptions of movies and books suggest just how much they mean to her and how deeply any sacrifices on the altar of contemporary sexual ethics might cut ... Elegant ... Occasionally the book feels as if it’s wandering from the mark ... Her book is at its best when it focuses on the individual’s encounter with a work of art that feels moving or profound or simply delightful and how knowledge of the artist’s noxious actions and beliefs can leave a 'stain' on that pleasure.
For Dederer, the wrong turns are the point—and perhaps the only path to whatever might pass for enlightenment. She burrows deeply into the idea of genius itself, both its glory and its limitations, and she begins with the hard stuff ... Would it be giving too much away to tell how Dederer ultimately solves the problem of monstrous creators? Or, at least, solves it to the extent any of us mere humans can? Monsters is a dazzling book. It’s also, occasionally, a maddening one. Dederer refuses to draw easy conclusions, always a plus. But in weighing the relative crimes and merits of, say, a J.K. Rowling—whose views on trans identity have sparked calls for boycotts even as her defenders say the fury is overshadowing the nuance—she can also come off as frustratingly noncommittal. At a certain point in the book, she balances two extremely complicated figures on a delicately calibrated seesaw ... Dederer acknowledges that it’s easier to sympathize with the fragile, enormously gifted Plath than with the firebrand [Valerie] Solanas, even as she tries to elicit some compassion for the latter. You may come away, as I did, largely unpersuaded.
Readers may chafe at the way in which the author seems to conflate their actions with the actions of monstrous men. Is she suggesting that we’re all a little monstrous? In fact, she is ... Monsters is an expansive and big-hearted work, part memoir, part cultural criticism, part paean to complexity and nuance, and a full embrace of the human experience. It’s a cry to respond to art not just with the analytical mind or the critic’s prim embrace, but with the full range of emotion, with the whole body, the complete biographical self. It is a refreshing book that is at times uncomfortable, even painful, but necessarily so. We cannot simply label the monsters, put them in cages, and excise them from our lives, because they are everywhere among us. They are us.
One hates to take Dederer’s word for it, but too often heightened emotion substitutes for substance in Monsters ... perhaps Dederer will return to the realm of memoir, where her forthrightness and humor are better employed in describing her own artistic and political battle. Appropriating the lives of others, she has proven, is for her a dead end.
Monsters is that rare breed—an important and timely book that is a joy to read ... Dederer’s skill as a memoirist contributes to the power of the essays, as she shares the political and social context of the times when she was considering each aspect of the problem ... Throughout every chapter in this compelling book, Dederer stimulates our own thinking. She doesn’t let us or herself off easily ... reading Monsters is like exploring them with a very wise and funny friend. I highly recommend it.
In the other camp of readers are those who are beguiled by her limpid prose and her willingness to dig deep into a question that necessarily involves a lot of waffling. I count myself among this second group, although I have some reservations about the book. I do like her idea of a sliding scale: a minor infraction by a great and much-loved artist shouldn’t cancel that person’s work, while a horrific act by someone you don’t think much of is certainly worth a cancellation. However, like many a book of nonfiction that begins with a great idea that could be adequately explored in fifty pages, Monsters veers off from its central point.
... a provocative meditation on our complex experience of art and artists as viewers, readers, and listeners ... given the monstrous subject matter (artists who do terrible things), she is often quite funny. Dederer’s humor usually comes alongside a serious point and with a David Foster Wallace-like parenthetical wink ... Frankly, her three-page critique of Annie Hall is worth the price of the book by itself ... As she meanders through artist-monsters recent and past, Dederer stands arm in arm with keen-eyed and sharp-tongued reporters like Janet Malcolm and Joan Didion, who led the way for her, or ones, like Rachel Kushner, contemporaries who write with the same ferocity and brilliance.
Nuanced and incisive ... There are no easy answers, but Dederer’s candid appraisal of her own relationship with troubling artists and the lucidity with which she explores what it means to love their work open fresh ways of thinking about problematic artists. Contemplative and willing to tackle the hard questions head on, this pulls no punches.
Dederer...locates the urgency of the question of how to treat the work of 'monster' artists and writers in the power of fandom ...Bringing erudition, emotion, and a down-to-earth style to this pressing problem, Dederer presents her finest work to date.
