The tainting of the work is less a question of philosophical decision-making than it is a question of pragmatism, or plain reality. That's why the stain makes such a powerful metaphor: its suddenness, its permanence, and above all its inexorable realness. The stain is simply something that happens. The stain is not a choice. The stain is not a decision we make. So, Monsters doesn't take for granted; it centers the contingent nature of these questions, not questioning for the sake of questioning (everything is relative! case closed!), but instead making room for that contingency of all contingencies, that always various thing: subjectivity. Anything can happen in that meeting place of the biography of the artist and the biography of the audience, and Dederer not only recognizes this, but makes it the foundation of her book. Her writing has an elasticity that is precisely suited to the topic at hand; it is what allows her to accommodate different contexts, viewpoints, ideas. Put another way, she approaches her topic with nuance and sensitivity. Monstrousness is not a monolith, and Dederer's book shows us how: there are different kinds of monsters, different kinds of responses to monstrousness, different standards for monstrousness. Personally, my favourite chapters were "The Genius," about how the genius of the male artist exerts a kind of force that excuses and countenances all kinds of monstrousness; "The Critic," about who responds to, and in what way, to art and to monsters; and "The Beloveds," which is the final chapter and which I won't say anything about because I don't want to spoil it (I've never thought of non-fiction as "spoilable," but Monsters is just that good).

I cannot refrain from pointing out the wretched irony of JK Rowling being considered monstrous these days. Most of the male monsters were raping and abusing girls and women, of course, and she (misguidedly or not) is all about trying to protect the rights of girls and women. We live in strange times. Claire Dederer is a journalist from Seattle and the author of two memoirs, the most well known of which is Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. In 2017, she wrote a piece for the Paris Review entitled What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men? in which she described the experience of rewatching the early films of Woody Allen ( Annie Hall, Manhattan) in the context of the allegations of abuse made against him by his adopted daughter, Dylan. The #MeToo movement was then just beginning and this piece, according to her publisher, went viral. Six years on, and it has now also been incorporated into Dederer’s new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, where it loiters alongside her thoughts on several other bad (or badly behaved) men who have made good art, among them Picasso, Roman Polanski and Richard Wagner. A valuable meditation on some of the era’s most urgent cultural questions . . . Emerging from Dederer’s reflections is the plain truth that every personal response to art is inseparable not only from the artist’s past but also the history of each member of its audience.” The same absence shows itself in Dederer’s thoughtful discussion of Annie Hall. She doesn’t really stop to consider who made Annie Hall. She just assumes it is a Woody Allen movie. And why wouldn’t she? But that absence speaks, in my view, to the continuing way that the genius of (usually) women actresses, models, and singers is undervalued in our culture. What are we saying to Diane Keaton when we say that a work of art she obviously put her whole heart and soul into in 1977, a work of art she made great, is ruined because of something Woody Allen did in 1992? 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? That we might be able to ameliorate the harm of Polanski’s violation of a schoolgirl or Picasso burning the face of his “muse” Françoise Gilot with a cigarette?Only a monster could know a monster so well. Surely Lolita must be some kind of mirror of its author?... Just how did Nabokov come to understand Humbert so perfectly? An exhilarating, shape-shifting exploration of the perilous boundaries between art and life. This timely book inhabits both the marvelous and the monstrous with generosity and wit.” What a treat it is: funny, lively and convivial, constantly in argument with itself… Dederer’s tone and willingness to be wrong and confused, along with her seductive, intimate style, bring the subject to new life… How rare and nourishing this sort of roaming thought is and what a joy to read. How moving, too, the underpinning adoration that allows the difficult questions to be asked. You are left wishing Dederer would apply her generous mind to every other niggling unfinished hang-up that haunts our culture.” When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they're saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that's not how stains work. Lolita is the scorched-earth offensive of pedophile novels (and sometimes, it seems, of novels in general)

It’s not cancel culture according to the author but rather an era when information is widely available, and it's now more difficult to ignore certain unpleasant facts. Also, the combination of #MeToo snd Hollywood access tapes placed this issue on steroids. This is a most interesting chapter, a nice addition to lolitological Studies, but every time you are thinking this book has now found its groove CD comes out with some highly dubious apercu that calls forth a groan or a puzzled frown : Thus near the end of the book the author stopped being a fellow judge with me as a reader viewing others, and instead changed into an author confessing her own monster-hood. Suddenly the question of whether monsters deserve forgiveness became intimate and personal. (It's interesting to note that the public is more forgiving of alcoholic fathers than they are of alcoholic mothers.) There were times when I wanted a deeper engagement with the content of the works under consideration. There is a passage, for example, where Dederer wishes she could watch the early Polanski classic Knife in the Water without the stain of Polanski’s crime. To separate out Polanski, “predator, rapist” from Polanski, “preternaturally talented Polish art student, wunderkind, Holocaust survivor.” Dederer’s point is that this is not possible. But reading the passage, all I could think was that Knife in the Water is one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen, a movie of barely contained violence, horror seething beneath the surface of every shot. What could it possibly mean for such a movie to be “unstained”? This is in no way a defence of Polanski, or even a point against Dederer. But there is an absence, here—a set of assumptions around authorship, and what art means and is for, that go unexplored. To be fair, the book isn’t about art—that’s right in the subtitle. The book is about fans, about audiences. Yeah, Vlad. Answers please. According to your biographer, you didn’t do anything nasty with little girls. We accept that. But you sure seem to have thought a lot about it.Dederer provides a fascinating new way of looking at how the work and lives of problematic artists are bound together. She poses so many topical questions, plays with so many pertinent ideas, that I'm still thinking about this book long after I finished.” If you are like me, and have conflicting feelings about what to do with art done by terrible human beings or cancel culture or even woke warrioring, or simply find it interesting to muse on the subject of art and the people who make it being less than perfect, all I can say is run. Run, don't walk to the place where you like to get your books and get your hands on "Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma". It should be the book for you, all I know for sure it was THE book for me.