Menu
Maybe someday
29
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
23/100Critics
34/100Scholars
Author:
Claire Dederer
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
April 25, 2023
In this book that expands upon her 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.
What The Reviewers Say
Vital, exhilarating.
Excellent.
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.
The book enables her to expand her purview, but it also leads to some repetition and extraneous byways.
