mattdube 's review for:

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

4.0

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I really enjoyed this thoughtful working through of the question of what to do with art made by people who have done abominable things. Diderer doesn't give a clear metric when you should cut a reader off, which maybe is something I unconsciously wanted (it's nice to have a clear answer, even when it's wrong), but she smartly works through a lot of issues that all get bound up in this question. I particularly like her construction that this is a memoir of an audience, instead of the writers/ artists who have acted out. It's a powerful framing, and even if I didn't get clear answers, I like thinking about it that way.

Lucid, wide-ranging, well-thought-through. Really a signal work of criticism for this moment.