Dederer invokes early on the poet William Empson: “Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that cannot be solved by analysis.” And if nothing about the artists covered here lends itself to solution, the author does show the evolution of her own response.

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Our relationship to art changes over time, after all, and perhaps the most brilliant chapter of original literary criticism is Dederer’s reading of Nabokov’s Lolita – first as a 13-year-old girl, and again in middle-age. Her teenage self was appalled; her mature reading is a knockdown defence of art’s remit, including the darkest corners of human experience. Dederer describes the author as an “anti-monster” – a novelist who risked being tainted by association, who wrote so convincingly in the voice of a monster to expose the ordinariness under Humbert’s delusion of exceptionalism.

It can work the other way, too. Rewatching Woody Allen’s Manhattan in the #MeToo era, Dederer can’t ignore how the director’s otherwise masterful comedy of self-indictment singularly fails on one subject: old dudes having sex with teenage girls.

Excusing artists by pointing to different eras and social mores gets short shrift in some cases. Richard Wagner’s virulent antisemitism – “a repugnance still abiding within us in spite of all our Liberal bedazzlements”, as he put it – was grotesque when it was written, though it foreshadowed not just Hitler and the Nazis, but (if you read “Liberal bedazzlements” as “political correctness”) Trumpian rhetoric today.

So much for progress. Sealing off “the Past” from the present, and indeed deploying the term “monster”, Dederer argues, are defences that serve to separate us from all that is worst about humanity. That should give us pause before leaping on the bandwagon of public denunciation.

And what about women?

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Monstrous female artists are not sex offenders, in Dederer’s view, but traitors to gender expectation. Mothers who abandon children to pursue careers (Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Joni Mitchell) or who do violence to themselves or their kids (Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath). The direst of Cyril Connolly’s so-called enemies of promise – “the pram in the hall” – looms large for women, and the fantasy of banishing it is captured in Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation: “My plan was never to get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.”

In the end, whether a work of art is spoiled by an artist’s behaviour – or not – is an emotional, not an ethical question. Dederer claims there’s an individual calculus to be made between someone’s love for a work of art, their own life experiences, and the biography of the artist.

As for boycotting artists? Dederer argues that it doesn’t matter in the way you might imagine.

Individuals do not, through consumer choice, possess the power to alter the amoral system of consumerism. Collective ethical responsibilities can’t be effectively outsourced to individual decisions about what to buy. Not watching Polanski films won’t stop one child from being raped… and pretending that it will is a distraction from achieving meaningful change.

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