It’s a strange experience, to be reviewed. Though who’s a reviewer to talk? I review music every few days, I guess. Have been doing so for about 20 years.

I once gave a speech about music criticism, and a critic’s life. I can’t find it on the Internet at the moment. I said that I bore in mind that a performer had feelings — and a mother. I also cited a William Safire aphorism: “Kick ’em when they’re up.”

Fortunately, I cover only first-tier musicians. I can’t make a dent in them, really — although one can still bruise, I’m sorry to say. And the politer you are, the worse you may bruise! (Anyone can dismiss a willfully hostile review.)

‐I’ve been fairly lucky in my reviews — I mean, reviews of my books. I’m used to valentines. I’m spoiled. But every now and then there’s a stinker, and that’s what gets up your nose.

More than once in this column, I’ve told the story of Reagan and the finger. It comes from Ed Koch. When he was mayor of New York, he rode with the president in his motorcade. People were on the sidewalks and streets, cheering him (Reagan, that is).

All of a sudden, Reagan said, “Hey, did you see that guy give me the finger?” Koch said, “Mr. President, all these people are excited to see you, and are wishing you well. And you care about a guy who gave you the finger?” Reagan answered, “That’s what Nancy says: I always see the guy with the finger.”

‐Years ago, John Betjeman, a very experienced writer, made an observation to David Pryce-Jones: You may get nine positive, even glowing reviews; the tenth one is hostile. And that’s the one you may be inclined to believe.

I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the gist of it.

‐How old were you when you realized you weren’t going to be universally approved? Five? That’s about the right age, but it can still amaze, and rankle. Can’t it?

I don’t mean to shock you, but there are people who don’t like this column. (They seem to read it anyway — which is weird.) Over the years, I’ve received mail that’s quite contradictory. I’ll give you the example that comes to mind.

Letter (or E-mail) 1: “I can’t stand you. You are always wallowing in darkness: dictatorship, persecution, imprisonment, torture. Why don’t you ever lighten up?”

Letter (or E-mail) 2: “I can’t stand you. You’re always writing chirpily — about music and language and such. Making puns. When will you grow up and get serious?”

‐Last fall, I published a book called “Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators.” Reaction to it has been interesting. Some of the reaction has involved the style of the book, and the relation of the style to the topic. Anyway, I will paraphrase three groups.

No. 1: “I found it hard to read your book, or impossible. The depravity of the dictators. What their children have had to cope with. Just too awful.”

No. 2: “How can you write so breezily about a topic so dark? What’s the matter with you?”

No. 3 (my favorite!): “I appreciated the style, throughout. Sometimes it was grave, sometimes it was light. And a lighter touch may be helpful when the topic is heavy. Sometimes gallows call for gallows humor.”

So, diff’rent strokes.

‐There are several reasons not to respond to a hostile review. First, an author should just rise above, or suck it up: Stinkeroos come with the territory. Second, you don’t want to draw attention to the stinkeroo. Third, you have other work to do and must “move on” (as the Democrats said in the second half of the 1990s).

But I feel like responding to a review. For one thing, an author likes to talk about his book! For another, we have a bit of a tradition at National Review: Bill Buckley liked to respond to negative reviews (or couldn’t resist doing so, sometimes). Negative reviews sparked some of his sharpest, tartest writing.

I’m going to respond, though not fully, to the most hostile of all my reviews — a review that is also the dimmest (which is some comfort). It appeared in one of my favorite magazines. One of my favorite publications. One of my favorite things: The (London) Spectator.

Imagine a favorite uncle coming to the door, delivering to you a pot of steaming sewage.

#share#

‐The Spectator titles its review “What does it really mean to have a tyrannical father?” And the subheading goes, “Disappointingly, we are none the wiser for reading Jay Nordlinger’s ‘inquiry’ into the children of 20 dictators — except that Castro’s ten-year-old had plenty to say about the banning of Christmas in Cuba.”

Huh. “We are none the wiser” for reading my book? Who’s “we”? Does that include the readers who have felt very much wiser?

And frankly, if “we” are none the wiser about what it’s like to be the son or daughter of a dictator after reading Children of Monsters, we are brain-dead.

Which we’re not, right?

The Spectator concedes, however, that we learn one thing: “that Castro’s ten-year-old had plenty to say about the banning of Christmas in Cuba.”

Huh? In my book, I write of one of Castro’s mistresses, Natalia Revuelta Clews, called “Naty.” With Castro, she had a daughter, Alina. When the girl was ten, in 1966, Naty informed her who her father was.

“Mommy, Mommy, call him!” the girl said excitedly. “Tell him to come here right away! I have so many things I want to tell him!” In her memoir, Alina (Fernández) writes, “I wanted him to find a solution to all the shortages: of clothes and things like that; of meat, so it could be distributed again through the ration books. I also wanted to ask him to give our Christmas back. And to come live with us.”

That’s it. That’s all she had to say about Christmas, so far as I’m aware. Does the one brief sentence constitute having “plenty to say about the banning of Christmas in Cuba”?

What a weird heading and subheading, The Spectator decided on — and more than weird, absolutely nuts.

And we have not, mind you, even gotten to the review itself . . .

‐The reviewer brings up Jean-Marie Loret, a Frenchman who claimed that he was Hitler’s son. His mother told him so, when he was already 30. “As a result of this bombshell,” says the reviewer, “Loret grew a Hitler moustache and adorned his home with pictures of his dad.”

Actually, the pictures have been put up by Jean-Marie’s son, Philippe, in his own home. That’s just a detail, and any reviewer can get a few wrong. It’s merely that I’m warming up a little …

‐Back to Christmas: The Spectator’s reviewer quotes Alina Fernández, as I do, in my book: “I also wanted to ask him to give our Christmas back.” Then the reviewer provides an explanation in parentheses: “(between 1969 and 1998, Castro banned Christmas).”

I do indeed say that in my book, which is why the reviewer knows it. But I’m also clear that Alina wished for her Christmas back in the years before 1969. As I explain, “Naty had suspended Christmas in her household, in solidarity with the revolution and the revolutionary regime.”

Still warming up …

‐The Spectator reviewer says that I rarely stray “beyond the remits of jaunty anecdote.” Well, some of the torture and murder and imprisonment and rape and exile and destitution and suicide is not so jaunty, but whatever. She then quotes me, for the purpose of mockery:

Here is something that may amuse you [say I]: For months on end, I borrowed books about dictators — psychopaths, mass murderers — from the library. I was worried that the librarians would have concerns about such a borrower.

Then the reviewer says, “Is this guy for real?”

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this guy (me) is for real. The sentences that are quoted come from my afterword — after I have gone through Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Kims, Saddam Hussein, et al., ending with Pol Pot. The last of these, you remember, presided over a regime that murdered between a fifth and a quarter of the country’s population.

My afterword begins,

To study the children of dictators is to spend a lot of time with unpleasantness. Dropping the understatement, I will put it another way: To write a book such as mine, you have to spend a lot of time with evil — the evil of dictators and their regimes. Sometimes, the children become part of it all. They join the machinery of oppression. You are perhaps ready to be done with dictators and their families. So am I.

I then say that it was odd, in December 2014, to be “listening to Christmas carols and looking into the ghastly crimes of Idi Amin.” I next say that, on Christmas Day itself, “I was checking some facts about Mengistu Haile Mariam’s ‘Red Terror.’” I proceed to say that, a few days later, “I was texting Tep Khunnal in Cambodia.” And “it was a strange feeling, I can tell you: to be sending a polite text to Pol Pot’s former secretary, and the husband of his widow, and the stepfather of his daughter.”

Next, I relate that “Paul Johnson, the great English historian, once planned to write a book called ‘Monsters.’ … But Johnson decided not to write it because, he told me, he did not want to spend so much time in the company of such people. I understand.”

At this juncture, I say the bit about borrowing from the library. Is that so bad, in an afterword, after 20 chapters of depravity? Am I for real? Or for unreal?

#share#

‐The reviewer mocks my writing, as is her right: “The only peculiar aspect of Children of Monsters is its prose style. It reads as though it were written in ‘how-you-say’ broken English. Thus Ceausescu’s daughter, Zoia, ‘was — how to put this? — a party girl’.”

Well, I could have said she was a slut, a tramp, a ho. (Or would that be “who’”?) This, in fact, is what I write:

Aside from being an intellectual, Zoia was — how to put this? — a party girl. She drank like a fish (“Vodka, in industrial quantities,” Pacepa specifies). [That would be General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the defector.] And she did not lack for male company. After the fall of Communism, newspapers in Romania described her as a “nymphomaniac” and “sex-crazed.” Those labels may have been sensationalistic, but they were not far from the mark, if off the mark at all. Picture a hedonistic, pretty, and brainy Zoia, darting around in her convertible white Mercedes, an auto that was “the dream of all Bucharest,” says Pacepa.

‐Let me do some final quotation of the reviewer — then of myself, please. First, the reviewer:

Here’s another anecdote. When Nordlinger was writing his book he had lunch with his friend Tom Greisha, a judge in New York. Hearing what Nordlinger’s subject was, Greisha ‘had just one comment — simple yet oddly profound. “People are interesting”.’
Nordlinger’s achievement — no mean feat — is to make the children of monsters less interesting than they initially seemed. ‘This book is, in part,’ he grumpily concedes, ‘a psychological study, I suppose.’ But he steers away from anything that comes close to an analysis of the effects of being sired by a maniac.

1) It’s Griesa — Tom Griesa, as I write. And here is the relevant bit from my foreword — the section in which one sets a book up:

… this is the children’s hour. In most cases, the children are bit players on the stage of history, not main players. They are footnotes, asides. But they are noteworthy footnotes and asides, and they are human beings — human beings born into a very strange position.
My book is, in part, a psychological study, I suppose. Obviously, there are themes, patterns, and connections among the children. These individuals share that “very strange position.” But they are also that: individuals. And they have coped with their situation in various ways. While I was writing the book, I had lunch with my friend Tom Griesa, a judge in New York, and told him what my subject was. He had just one comment — simple yet oddly profound: “People are interesting.” Yes, they are. Sometimes more interesting than they want to be.

You see? (I imagine you do.)

2) It’s not that I am grumpy about a psychological study. It’s just that I know too much about my subject to do a lot of psychologizing and generalizing. I could — and it might be impressive-sounding — but it would be false. I know that, as soon as I say X, I can contradict it with Y. Of course there are “themes, patterns, and connections” among the children, as I say. But they have led individual lives — as I detail.

3) Can a reader be bored by these children? Evidently so. And that is “no mean feat,” to borrow a phrase. Can a reader, on consuming these pages, fail to know “the effects of being sired by a maniac”? Can he be “none the wiser”? Evidently so. That, too, is no mean feat.

And these feats are possibly unique. Is The Spectator for real?

Egotist that I am, I will give you another opinion, from Mark Helprin. Even worse, I’m going to quote his blurb! And we all know what hypola a blurb is. But Helprin is not the type, trust me.

“A magnetic page-turner that nonetheless is complex and deep. The fascinating and horrific details Nordlinger unearths flow together to pose important and disturbing questions about love, loyalty, history, and human nature.”

And here he speaks to the American reader in particular: “In the end, one is left somewhat shaken but profoundly grateful for the American Constitutional order. To the point where you say to yourself, thank God I live here.”

Read the book for yourself, if you like – and see who has the better understanding: The Spectator or Helprin (and other commenders).

Young people everywhere — maybe people in general, but especially the young — say, “I just want to be understood!” That is the cry, probably, of every book author. Even if not liked: understood.

‐I have not read The Spectator in a while — I was just thinking, I’m getting to miss Charles Moore — but I’m told that David Pryce-Jones’s new memoir, Fault Lines, has received a negative review. This book, ladies and gentlemen, is a full-out masterpiece. As Commentary’s reviewer said in the last words of his review, “It will become a classic.”

‐As for me, I can say to my cherished Speccie, Attack me if you will, boys. But next time — a little less stupidly?