Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

Dederer doesn't aim to tell you what you should do with the work of terrible people. What she offers is a refreshingly honest meditation on the topic so if you were afraid of this one being a defense of “cancel culture” fear not this isn't what you'll find.
I don't think I'm any closer to a less amorphous take on the subject than I was before but I feel validated in some regards so there's that.

DNF 50%

This book is not really enlightening, its just exhausting. I've seen a lot of people say this book made them think about a lot of things but I guess I have already thought about those things because nothing in this book so far felt to me like worthwhile of being a book and not an essay, and I furthermore don't know why this author should be the one I'm listening to. It's mostly just, “oh yeah, a lot of people loved Harry Potter/David Bowie/Bill Cosby, and they shouldn't have to feel bad for that, but sometimes they do anyways” over and over again.

I so thoroughly enjoyed this book, and in large part of what Dederer doesn't do: she's not preachy, she's not minimizing of the severity of her task (making sense of the art of “monsters”). Rather, she takes seriously both the work of some many great and their crimes, moral if not also legal. She does this while taking you along for the ride and forcing (helping?) you interrogate how you square what you love with what you believe, as she does so well in this passage:

“[W]ho is this ‘we' that's always turning up in critical writing? We is an escape hatch. We is cheap. We is a way of simultaneously sloughing off personal responsibility and taking the mantle of easy authority. It's the voice of the middlebrow male critic, the one who truly believes he knows how everyone else should think. We is corrupt. We is make-believe. The real question is this: can I love the art but hate the artist. Can you? When I say ‘we', I mean I. I mean you“

For the first 1-2 chapters, this book seemed more like a memoir rather than a work of literary criticism, and I wasn't a fan. But the author delved into the primary aspects of the book soon enough, and it improved significantly. Towards the last chapters the author's memoirist voice became more prominent again, and the main argument seemed underdeveloped. Instead of discussing the consumption of the artist's work and dealing with the problematic aspects of the artist's personal life, some parts were overly convoluted, focusing excessively on the admiration for the artist at a superficial level. This was unexpected from a book of literary criticism. Initially, I wasn't too fond of the open-endedness in each chapter, but after the author's explanation on the topic of subjectivity and personal experience, I gained more clarity on that. However the thesis, pointing to “there's no ethical consumption under consumerism” seemed rather lazy and uncreative. Coupled with the author's excessive sentimentality towards some of the artists, repeatedly expressing “I love him” I had hoped for a deeper exploration of this topic, combining both logical analysis and subjective viewpoints. I expected more exploration of the parasocial relationship between fans and problematic artists, as well as more rigorous explanations on capitalism's influence on our consumption habits, especially concerning specific artists.

I would rate this book 3.5 stars out of 5

This is something I have spend a great deal of time thinking about. As a childrens' librarian in a period when kid's book authors were being cancelled left and right (Dr. Seuss's racism, Laura Ingalls Wilder's racism, etc). I mean how do I tell a kid who just adores Harry Potter that the twat who wrote it is loud and proud with her hate?
I did not expect miracles with this book, instead it's more of a conversation. There's a history here, there are causes, and there is an idea of how to be about it. It does not have all of the answers, but I did not expect it to. I appreciated it, though.
Now someone please write a book about Americans and their very short memories, because the Cat in the Hat is still the mascot for Read Across America and everyone seems to have forgiven Book of the Month Club for only ever promoting white authors.