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.

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.

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.

Exhilarating, gnarly.

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.

In an era full of reputational and textual revisions, Dederer’s book comes across as sane and nuanced — even refreshingly brave.

Carefully argued, densely nuanced essays examining her own conflicted emotional and intellectual responses to consuming art created by people she knows have harmed others.

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.

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.

Brilliant.

A needless expansion: one that retreads some familiar ground...and introduces some newer, though somehow still stale, lines of inquiry.

Dederer weaves her experiences as a working writer, mother, and teacher, writing what she calls, 'an autobiography of the audience'.

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.

The latest entry in a new meta-genre: the moral reckoning with the moral reckoning that is cancel culture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One hates to take Dederer’s word for it, but too often heightened emotion substitutes for substance in Monsters.

Monsters is that rare breed—an important and timely book that is a joy to read.

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..

Insightful.

... a provocative meditation on our complex experience of art and artists as viewers, readers, and listeners.

By turns emotional and measured, this is a valuable meditation on some of the era’s most urgent cultural questions..

Nuanced and incisive.

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..