Book Review: Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

Knopf

It's the late '90s in Chicago. While browsing at a record shop, I hear a voice like a divine gift. I walk over to ask the clerk, "Who is this?" The answer: Bill Withers. Listening to him felt like standing in the cathedral of Notre Dame. Sadly, years later I read he was a domestic abuser. Not a rumor, a fact. Not an angel, a monster. If I don't stop listening, how do I defend my choice without excuses?

Genius exists unbridled within the artists who matter. True muses inspire without rules or mores. If artists are given complete license to create without boundaries, how do we hold them accountable for monstrousness exhibited in their private lives? Are we able to reconcile our love for their art and the horror of their crimes? Where do we place our private disappointment and collective outrage? The book addresses Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson, the former convicted and the latter accused of sexual abuse of children. Richard Wagner and C.S. Lewis, anti-Semites. Pablo Picasso and John Lennon, serial abusers. Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls-Wilder, racists. Other women monsters like Anne Sexton, Doris Lessing, and Joni Mitchell — guilty in their abandonments and refusals of motherhood. These crimes feel like betrayals.

Claire Dederer, Gen-X essayist and critic, holds our hands as we navigate the slickness of these ethical dilemmas. As much as she guides us, she also pushes us into her tiger traps dug along the way. She waits until we crawl out with our fandom bruised by our own morals. Her memoirist approach to this minefield spins one like a corkscrew. We love the work, we loathe the maker. Does the beauty of the work outweigh the heft of the crime? The knots binding these complexities tightened in the wake of #metoo and Trump's election. As we sidestep the swinging pendulum, we need to understand Cancel Culture is no better than book burning. Who decides what to do? The audience or the individual consumer?

For decades, we've been asked to separate the art from the artist. Don't think of Hemingway when reading Hemingway. Is that even possible? It was much easier to do when we didn't have complete access to everyone's biography. Now with unlimited resources tucked into our back pockets, we shine an unforgiving flashlight into all the dark corners of those we admire. Technology has given us greater opportunities to poke at atrocities and infractions. The powerful inspiration experienced by my youthful embrace of David Bowie's music now buckles under the post-mortem weight of Laurie Maddox's reveal (that she lost her virginity to Bowie when she was just 15). Am I a hypocrite if I still love his music? Does the victim still have a voice if I dismiss the actions of her monster?

I delight in questions unfolding not into answers but more questions. This is what Monsters does. Apt metaphors are utilized in the absence of absolutes. "The Stain" is Dederer's choice of words. I think of unicorn tapestries at The Cloisters in NYC. They are imperfect — stained and worn. Yet as a kid, I fine-tuned my focus beyond the aberrations. The creator's stain doesn't leave the creation. It irrevocably changes our perceptions. Yet it does not hide, overshadow, or cancel the work. Dederer doesn't provide any concrete answers. She emphasizes the importance of the questions and the many possible considerations — just like the best essays should.

Knopf // 257 pages // Art, Criticism, Philosophy, Feminism