What Month Is It?? Books (part 1) - Spring 2023
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer
I can’t think of any book published this year that I’ve anticipated as keenly as Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer. It’s a smart and entertaining read, and I wish I had more time to explore it further here but needs must. For now, this will have to suffice.
Monsters explores the thorny issue of whether we can separate great artists from their abhorrent behavior and misdeeds, which is to say, whether we can value the art while decrying the artist. I have strong feelings about this and as it happens, my opinions are in direct opposition to views held by my wife. There have been terse words exchanged in our house as we each defend our corners.
A short version of my own opinion (no surprise here) is that we MUST separate the two. Don’t get me wrong – my interest and appreciation of Morrissey, for example, has cratered over the years, largely fueled by his ignorant political and racist opining. I well recall his second solo album release Kill Uncle (1991), with the couplet in Bengali in Platforms, ‘’Cos life is hard enough/When you belong here’ which had people wondering if they’d understood the line correctly (they had). Perhaps not coincidentally, it was an awful album, a precursor of things to come. But for all of his selfish boorishness over the last thirty years, I still recognize and enjoy the brilliance of The Smiths, and in particular, Morrissey’s unique lyrical gifts.
Dederer begins her exploration with the examples of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, both of whom are subject ripe for investigation ('dissection' might be a more apropos word choice, depending on how you see things). For many years I considered Manhattan my favorite movie of all time. Allen’s fraught personal history, and significantly, the way he has made a habit of creating (frequently young) female characters that seem to embody all kinds of creepy older man sexual fantasies (see: Vicky Cristina Barcelona) has impacted my opinion of Manhattan... but not to the extent that I can no longer see or enjoy its beautiful cinematography, or admire elements of the writing. I see it as less perfect now, yes. Flawed, but not completely ruined.
Dederer finds herself chasing her own argument, and ultimately decides that the issue is unresolvable at the collective level, and that we each must find our own position of comfort. She takes an interesting deep dive into Nabokov and Lolita, in which she absolves the author of his potential sins, elevating the work rather than seeing its author as debased. For me, and for many others, Lolita is one of the great prose poems of the twentieth century, and as the shrewd Dorothy Parker remarked, also one of the great love stories. The fact that a sexual attraction to pre-pubescent girls features through so many of Nabokov’s novels does point to a flaw in the human machine and cast a cloud across the overall achievement, but Lolita remains a great book.
Does this 'flaw' mean we shouldn’t buy Nabokov’s books? Or as my wife suggests, that she won’t watch a Woody Allen movie as long as he continues to reap a financial reward from doing so? I like Dederer’s response to this question, in a book that is intelligently argued, brave and engaging: The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to do that.
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
Second Place is the story of a celebrated artist who comes to live in a couple’s guest house, and the emotional havoc it wreaks on the lives of all involved. It wasn’t until after I’d finished reading it that I discovered, via an author’s note, that the novel was loosely based, or inspired by, a 1932 memoir by Mabel Dodge Luhan in which she reflects on a period during which DH Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico. I’m not sure how that might have affected my reading of it had I known in advance.
This is the second book I’ve read by Cusk. The first was part one of her widely acclaimed Outline trilogy. I admired that first book, its cool intelligence, without really loving it. Second Place represented a second chance of sorts with me, but I’m afraid it didn’t take. The narrative style... perhaps the descriptive word ‘cool’ might better be replaced with ‘cold’? ‘Clinical’ might be more apt, but only in terms of precision. Also, I can’t help feeling that a nagging sense of bitterness, a sort of passive victimhood permeates both books. Cusk seems to be a writer I want to enjoy, but somehow don’t.
The Juice is a journal dedicated to things I've been reading, looking at, or doing that inform my creative practice.