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Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma
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6/99
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91/99
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About This Book
From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, a passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of #MeToo, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men? Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.
Reviews
"Dederer artfully combines memoir with criticism."
"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?"
"By turns emotional and measured, this is a valuable meditation on some of the era's most urgent cultural questions."
"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."
"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 ..."
"The field of criticism claims objective standards that remove the emotional response of the critic from its evaluation."
"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 ..."
"Throughout every chapter in this compelling book, Dederer stimulates our own thinking."
"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'?"
"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."
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