Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

How do you solve a problem like Roman Polanski? This is how Claire Dederer (Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning) distills the conundrum in the dauntless, cannily reasoned and barn-burning Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma: "Polanski made Chinatown, often called one of the greatest films of all time. Polanski drugged and anally raped thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey. There the facts sit, unreconcilable. How would I maintain myself between these contradictions?"

It's not lost on Dederer that the question has long been percolating: people can just as easily ask how it is possible to appreciate the work of the virulently antisemitic but irrefutably brilliant German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883). With a historian's commitment to taking the long view and with fire under her feet from the #MeToo movement, she makes a thoroughgoing inquiry into the vexing question of how to reconcile bad people with their good art.

Dederer's feminism won't allow an essentialist view that monstrousness is exclusively the province of men, but the research she does, as into Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell, and Sylvia Plath, all of whom in one way or another relinquished a child or two, uncovers a double standard: "This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always."

As for the question that launches her book: it doesn't give everything away to say that Dederer has come to see that asking "What do we do with the art of monstrous men?" is the narrowing of the more foundational question "What do we do about the monstrous people we love?" Monsters is the book that anyone determined to live an intentional life owes it to themselves to read. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer

Powered by: Xtenit