Book of the week
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma
(Knopf, $28)
What do we do with the great art created by monstrous people? asked Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. That question troubles many culture consumers these days, and with her new book, critic Claire Dederer “looks boldly down the cliff at the roiling waters below and jumps right in.” Expanding on a 2017 Paris Review essay that appeared shortly after reports of producer Harvey Weinstein’s sexual predation ignited the MeToo movement, Dederer augments her rogues’ gallery, weighing in not just on Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Michael Jackson but also on a surprising number of women. Whether her subjects’ offenses were sexual crimes, racist writing, or simple self-centeredness, Dederer brings her emotional response to that knowledge into her assessments, and the result is “part memoir, part treatise, and all treat.”
“Dederer ventures into this minefield with a divided soul,” said Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic. She has no sympathy for male artists whose reputations have been damaged by their abusive behavior, but she also adores great art and doesn’t want it cast aside because of its creators’ moral failings. “She asks the important questions.” Do geniuses deserve special dispensation from bad behavior? What if they’re already dead? “To her credit, she skirts categorical answers” while refusing to pretend that we can block out what we know about an artist’s sins. “Dederer’s ultimate recommendation for dealing with immorality in artists is very sensible. We should engage with their art, not quash it, and work through our qualms at the same time.”
Her take on David Bowie proves especially instructive, said Laura Miller in Slate. Bowie was a hero to Dederer, and she acknowledges how disturbing it was for fans to learn after his death that he had once taken the virginity of a 15-year-old groupie. Dederer comes to realize that nothing is more unsettling than the transgressions of artists, such as Bowie, who once seemed to be modeling ways to live, and the realization is freeing. After all, when confronting bad behavior, “the solution is not to smash your idols” but to recognize that they are merely human. And however much we may wish to police culture, “the obdurate truth remains that some of the most beautiful and profound things humanity has created are the work of terrible people. We can decide, in a fury of righteousness, to cast those works aside. Or we can choose to view them as a kind of grace, the miraculous salvage from the inevitable wreck of our lives.”