A masterpiece. A difficult, challenging, cruelly misanthropic, desperately hopeful (or hopefully desperate?), linguistic feat. Patrick White famously considered Christina Stead to be the greatest Australian novelist, and - although I think he was - Stead must be in the running. The dire situation of Henny and Sam's household was based in part on Stead's own childhood (the reason why she fled Australia) and you feel the needle-sharp accuracy of her characterisations. Surely neither of these people can be real. Yet they also feel so true. Yet they also feel so literary.

Stead must be read on her terms, especially in The Man Who Loved Children, but she will reward those who like their literature confronting, tangled, and inventive. (Also, if you're going to buy a used copy, buy the Penguin paperback from the 1960s with an introduction by Randall Jerrall! He almost single-handedly restored this forgotten 1940s novel to the public eye, and the introduction is a masterpiece of old-world criticism: even-handed, luxurious in its praise but fair in its criticisms, and masterful in its analysis of the central characters and themes.) ( )

I'll start by saying that I understand why many contemporary novelists are fans of this novel. The family dynamics in this novel are so life-like, I felt like a fly on the wall who is observing a real dysfunctional family. That being said, the novel suffers from a lack of critical editing. It could easily have been cut to half the length without any loss of resonance or truth. Still, I recommend it to anyone that writes about family dynamics and any fan of novels centering around those dynamics. Just be prepared to work hard to make it through the overly drawn out center of the novel. ( )

What is memorable are the book's characters, especially the couple, Sam and Henny, and Louise to a certain extent. The plot is rather long, and you need patience to get through it. But if you have patience, there are some unforgettable scenes. For example, Ms Aiden's visit to their house. You see how run-down and decrepit their living environment is, and how poor the family is. In contrast, Sam thinks they live in paradise. He lives in a world of his own and is quite unlikeable. He touts the goodness of man but mocks and denigrates people, advocates eugenics, and manipulates his children. In contrast, Henny is the pitiable one. Despite her pronouncement to the contrary, she loves her children and is the one silently helping the family to survive. ( )

Well, that's what I get for reading that Christina Stead, the author of The Man Who Loved Children, is from Australia and assuming the novel's setting followed suit, therefore qualifying as A Book Set Somewhere You’ve Always Wanted To Visit. I have never been to the land down under. I have been to DC—where the novel is set—multiple times, and could have done without this visit.

Until the last chapter, this was a thoroughly deplorable book that left me wondering why it made the 1,001 BYMRBYD list. Some of my early review notes include the observation that Ms. Stead must have been disappointed that The Idiot was already used as the title of another, much better novel, because her main character displays all the traits of one. Another note, in response to the title of section 5 of chapter 8, "What Will Make You Shut Up," was: apparently, nothing. The preface to my copy credits Sam's annoying patois to various works I'm either entirely unfamiliar with or have only the barest knowledge of: Artemus Ward, Hiawatha, Uncle Remus. I struggled to believe pre-adolescent children would be as enthralled with their father's blathering as portrayed, given the mundane, juvenile nature of the letters they write to him while he is away.

Sam Pollit, the government bureaucrat at that heart of this tale of family disfunction, is an insufferable buffoon of a father who babbles in baby-talk-like gibberish to his children. His wife, Henny, debutant turned wretch, spends the bulk of her days hiding in her room from her verbally abusive husband. The first four hundred pages of the story paint a grim picture of their marriage. Sam takes a ten-month government trip to Singapore. Upon his return, he loses his position (for reasons which go largely unexplained). The family moves to a run-down house in Baltimore, where the unemployed Pollit spends his days in idiotic schemes and activities rather than seeking a way to support his family. Unsurprisingly, the family becomes destitute.

Then, in an inverse deus ex machina, all sorts of awful things happen in the final chapter, leading to an unexpected but long overdue ending which I won't spoil. This last chapter might have been stretched into an interesting novella if prefaced by a brief history of the family's unhappiness which spared readers from slogging through endless pages of Sam's "conversations."

Ultimately, The Man Who Loved Children is a portrait of an unkind father inflicting emotional distress on his hapless wife and children, and the price they all pay for his so-called devotion. While the ending somewhat redeems the novel, I don't agree with the jacket blurb describing it as "one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century." ( )

This book grows on you. Please stick at it. You may want to quit after 100 or so pages. Sam Pollit is the evil that looms in half formed ideas and narcissistic kindness. He is a criminal who believes he has committed no crime other than love. But his "love" is toxic. It is malignant. It is childish. He is cruel. Stead has written a beautiful novel that can only be fully grasped by finishing its 500 pages. I have given it 4 stars. But I feel other the next couple of days it will haunt me to a 5. ( )

Why did I not know? How could it be? Stead, or at least this book, ranks with or above the other "all style, little to no story" masters/masterpieces of the century, right there with Joyce, Gass, and White. Her prose might actually be denser than theirs, her commitment to the sentence deeper.

MWLC is a flawed book in only one way: the first 100 pages are molasses slow, and to little obvious purpose. The whole thing is repetitive, but the first fifth. Oh boy. The repetition in the rest is earned; the first fifth is, I regret, dull. But much better that way than, as with Gass's 'Tunnel', White's 'Vivisector' or Joyce's everything, sticking the boring bits in the middle or end.

And Stead does much better than those esteemed gents at giving you some reason to keep reading, other than art for art's sake. Nobody will ever care whether Stephen and Bloom meet, but here I (at least) really wanted to know how this idiotic family would finally implode.

As with White (who blurbs this edition), Stead is perfect at dysfunctional relationships between individuals; unlike him, she can write about more than one person in any given scene. Like him, she traffics in dualities; but whereas his are abstract and philosophical, hers are rooted in history. Here, Henrietta (conservatism and aristocracy, but in the good way) faces off against Sam (progressive, but in the bad white-man-will-save-the-world way). It's a great portrait of early twentieth century American ideas.

And her rants are often better than Gass's. Consider, if nothing else, Henrietta on suicide:

"There are so many ways to kill yourself, they're just old-fashioned with their permanganate: do you think I'd take permanganate? I wouldn't want to burn my insides out and live to tell teh tale as well; itiots! It's simple. I'd drown myself. Why not put your head in a gas oven? They say it doesn't smell so bad..."

It continues for a page and a half, as she decides how she would, and wouldn't kill herself. It's glorious stuff. ( )

If Shakespeare had written this, we'd call it one of his 'difficult' plays. If Donna Tartt had written it we'd be dead from the shock. As exquisitely tailored as The Goldfinch is, this book is not. It's a meandering, repetitive quagmire.

Christina Stead, who was capable of great neatness in prose, took it upon herself in this book to write as people actually live and actually speak. The result makes one realise how important the writer is to the process of making ourselves bearable in print. Writers may need editors, but they are nonetheless the front line of editing themselves. Can a writer get away with telling it - really telling it - how it is: every mundane statement, tedious repetition, tawdry detail. I'd say, based on this book, a qualified 'yes'.

Rest here:

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/the-man-who-loved-children... ( )

If Shakespeare had written this, we'd call it one of his 'difficult' plays. If Donna Tartt had written it we'd be dead from the shock. As exquisitely tailored as The Goldfinch is, this book is not. It's a meandering, repetitive quagmire.

Christina Stead, who was capable of great neatness in prose, took it upon herself in this book to write as people actually live and actually speak. The result makes one realise how important the writer is to the process of making ourselves bearable in print. Writers may need editors, but they are nonetheless the front line of editing themselves. Can a writer get away with telling it - really telling it - how it is: every mundane statement, tedious repetition, tawdry detail. I'd say, based on this book, a qualified 'yes'.

Rest here:

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/the-man-who-loved-children... ( )

It's true, this may be the best and funniest book about family I've ever read. I think my favorite "recurring gag," of which this book has lots, is the way the dad is a real casual eugenicist. This book drags, often, but I think it's a very good study of human beings. The same way that "Heart is a Lonely Hunter" or "Endless Love" really stopped me in my tracks with the ability to GET people, so too did stuff like this:

"This messiness was only like all of Louie's contacts with physical objects. She dropped, smashed, or bent them; she spilled food, cut her fingers instead of vegetables and the tablecloth instead of meat. She was always shamefaced and clumsy in the face of that nature which Sam admired so much, an outcast of nature. She slopped liquids all over the place, stumbled and fell when carrying buckets, could never stand straight to fold the sheets and tablecloths from the wash without giggling or dropping them in the dirt, fell over invisible creases in rugs, was unable to do her hair neatly, and was always leopard-spotted yellow and blue with old and new bruises. She shut drawers on her fingers and doors on her hands, bumped her nose on the wall, and many time felt like banging her head against the wall in order to reach oblivion and get out of all this strange place in time where she was a square peg in a round hole.

Louie knew she was the ugly duckling. But when a swan she would never come sailing back into their village pond; she would be somewhere away, unheard of, on the lily-rimmed oceans of the world. This was her secret. But she had many other intimations of destiny, like the night rider that no one heard but herself. With her secrets, she was able to get out from nearly every one of the thousand domestic clashes of the year, and, as if going through a door into another world, forget about them entirely. They were doings of beings of a weaker sort."

And the same way that "Narrow Rooms" uses believability as the starting point for the MOST outrageous, fucked up family drama on planet Earth, so too does this book get away with a lot just because of how real it feels. Recommended if you can withstand a book that's like... 2/3 baby talk, btw.
( )

Two days after having read The Man Who Loved Children and I'm finally settling down. I don't think I've ever changed a 1 star review to a 5 star review before, but there it is. I've moved from feeling "this is a brilliant book, but I hate it" to feeling: "I may hate this book, but it's brilliant."

This novel made me feel dreadfully insecure about my role as a parent. I've decided that is interesting and amazing rather than something to blame it for. The parents in this novel are dreadful in all the ways I dread being, I suppose.

I was so unsettled by Stead's portrayal of a father who tries to be a friend to his children but ends up doing so in all the most damaging ways, smothering them, obliterating their individuality, so that they become supports for his ego and nothing more. Sam Pollitt is a dreadful father, and yet he thrives on the attention of his children, and his children adore him, even when he is his most self-centered and cruel. Only Louisa, the eldest child, begins to see through her father. Her journey and her growing insight become the redemptive arc in this otherwise bleak story.

Henrietta Pollitt is the kind of mother who not only resents her children but also freely shares with them every resentment she feels toward them; who tells them openly how they have ruined her life; who plays with the notion of suicide in their presence; who barely acknowledges her obligations toward them. I have to confess that I am -not- one of those parents who have never wondered, however much I love my children, what it might have been like to have lived a life without them--what I might have achieved or enjoyed if I didn't have the obligation to love them and to care for them. Just having ever had that skinny daydream in my head of what my life may have been without children made me vulnerable to the horror novel that this novel is at its heart.

I applaud Stead for taking my parental insecurities to the farthest darkest place in this novel. The story is extreme, but it is accurate and educative, and true in the way only a great, classic tragedy can be.

My original 1-star review, below the line.
=============================
What it does, it does extremely well.

Imagine "To Kill a Mockingbird" where every character is like Bob Ewell. "Harry Potter" where every character is like Draco Malfoy. "Picture of Dorian Grey" where every character is like Dorian Grey. That's what it felt like to read The Man Who Loved Children.

There is no doubt that this is an exquisitely written novel. Every sentence is masterful. Open any page and you'll find a sentence that amazes.

And there is also something amazing and uncanny about Christina Stead--that she could have such a pure approach, such laser-like genius of dialog and scene and setting; that she could bring to brilliant three-dimensional life these greasy, selfish, repulsive, narcissistic people.

The relentlessness of Stead's take on humanity overwhelmed me, though. If it had been a shorter book I'd probably be praising it. But eventually its meanness overcame its art for me, and my final feeling after having read the novel was one of nausea and despair. ( )

How is the author, Christina Stead, not a household name along with other great authors??

The Man Who Loved Children is no carefree beach read, but neither is To Kill a Mockingbird or the Brothers Karamazov. Written with such intelligence that delves into the depths of human struggles yet displays a ruthless wit into the absurdity of human foibles. Blown away! This 5-star rating is from a reader who rarely denotes many books worthy of this rating. ( )

This is clearly a kind of masterpiece. A masterpiece of a portrait of gaslighting, maybe? But it's also annoying as hell. ~5% of this book is in this familial baby talk language that FEELS just absolutely disgusting to me, but which clangs true in the way the father uses it to suffocate attention that's anywhere but on him. ( )

A good if uncomfortable story of a dysfunctional family in 1930s Washington. Despite the title there is no paedophilic element to the story at all. A story about a toxic couple and their more endearing children. And some great writing to keep the reader company. ( )

Oh, this book. I went through many stages of hating this book. I read it because it was a group read for the 1001 books to read before you die group. First confusion was that I thought this was on the list as an Australian class and assumed it would be set in Australia. Nope - Washington, D.C./Baltimore/Annapolis. My neck of the woods. This is in essence a family epic - a very large family scraping by in D.C. until the father loses his job and they become basically destitute. But the real problem here is the vitriolic hatred between the father, Sam, and mother, Henny. It's very disturbing to witness, especially consider the book is supposed to be semi-autobiographical.

In the end, the book kept my attention, but only because it was like watching a train wreck. I really wouldn't recommend it. ( )

This book disappointed me. I expected something great from the rave reviews that I had read, as well as its status on Time's Top 100 Novels series, but I was left with a bittersweet taste on my literary taste. I don't quite understand why the novel was supposed to be engaging and it comes off as a little melodramatic, overdone, and over appreciated. If you are looking for great novels from that list, I would recommend staying clear of this one.

2 stars- not recommended. ( )

At first I thought this was going to annoy me bvery much - and, in places, it did. Sam, the father of the family, is very annoying. He loves his children, he thinks he is great with them, but, in reality, he is self centred, foolish and stifles them. He is the child who has never grown up and so has never learnt to cope with the adult world, and so never shoulders his parental responsibilities. This is reflected in the several conversations he has with Louie, the oldest child, on the cusp of womanhood, he contirnues to call her by her childhood nickname, to belittle her and to make feel worthless in comparison to him. Every conversation they have seems to come round to Sam and what he needs, it is never about meeting Louie's needs. His behaviour is clearly designed to show how much he is in tune with children, but it doesn;t work. The diminutives for the children work to some extent, but they ought to change as they grow older, and these don't. The private language that each family develops itself, immortalising mispronunciations and so on, again OK, that happens in any family, it's the way that the family language that only Sam uses is a mock baby talk that I found grating, it infantalises the children, probably as Sam is unable to deal with them as individuals that have their own needs and wishes - he sees them as an adjunct to him.

Sam's wife if Henny and she is, in some ways, his opposite. Not just dark to his blond, she has an opposite personality, very much more earthbound, practical, more despondant than optomistic. She, however, is the one that gets the family into money troubles and can't get oiut of them, partly as Sam just declines to be involved in any serious conversation about their issues.

It is the children that I felt for the most. The oldest two are the most finely drawn, Louie (Louise) and Ernest. They are of different character and temprament Louie looks destined for the stage or literature, Ernest to be an accountant or financial whizz of some description. Both are subdued by their father and torn between the behaviour of the two parents. Not that Henny is entirely innocent either. The scene when Ernest finfs his money box has been emptied is a dreadful betrayal.

I can;t say I enjoyed this, the two main characters are far to unpleasant for that to be entirely true. However, it was well written. I felt it got into its stride more at ~ page 200, after Sam had returned from his voyage. The final chapters are a rollercoaster of emotion, although you do finsih feeling that at least Louie will be OK. ( )

I just couldn't get into Christina Steads' (the horribly titled) "The Man who Loved Children." I really wanted to like this book, but found myself just struggling to read it page after page. I think it was the writing itself that really made this difficult for me.

The Pollits are an extremely dysfunctional family -- Henny and Sam haven't really spoken in years except to bark at each other. The impact of their circumstances is felt differently by each member of their large family.

Sam and Henny are both brutal characters in their own separate ways. I had a hard time with Sam, who talks in baby talk to his children and has a creepy way of interacting with them that I really disliked. I liked the ideas and the central story in this one, but not the way it was written, if that makes any sense. ( )

I am not quite sure where to begin with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. Let’s just say this book will not make my list of favorite reads. The novel was originally published in 1940 and is about a highly dysfunctional family. It is difficult to say which character deadens the soul more, with the contest being between Sam Pollit, the father, who is a narcissistic egotist that talks to his children in highly annoying baby talk, and his wife, Henny, the mother, with her whiny negativity, resentments and many threats of suicide or infanticide.

The family begins the book living in a run-down Georgetown house in Washington, D.C. There is a distinct lack of money, sense and love in this family. Nevertheless, she pulls no punches and we read page after page of Sam’s baby talk and Henny’s bitter outbursts leaving the reader feeling like that have just gone through 10 rounds in a boxing ring. The loathing between Sam and Henny made this a very chilling read.

I was overwhelmed by this sprawling, exhausting story but I do admire how the author delivered these deeply flawed, highly unlikable characters and managed to mostly hold my interest. I understand that the author based the characters on her own family, with herself as the oldest daughter, Louisa. If this is true, than, believe me, she has my greatest sympathy. I would have preferred the book to have been shorter but The Man Who Loved Children did vividly and painfully display the structure and the inner life of a disintegrating family and in that, was rather brilliant. ( )

Once you’ve got over the fact that this isn’t a sinister title in terms of today’s worries about child abuse, you discover that this is, in fact, more of a study in spousal neglect and the emotional-relational issues that arise when a husband and father lives with his head in the clouds. For all that, this is a pretty down to earth novel which, for me, started a bit too slowly.

There’s really nothing I can add to a review of this book that hasn’t already been written in Jonathan Franzen’s wonderful review… except, that is, what I thought of it and how it related to me, so that’s where I’ll focus. I should say at the outset that I do have a father who loves children. There were times in the novel when I was also reminded of my father’s idealism and how it affected our family for both good and bad. It made me realise that, in comparison, we got off lightly.

Stead has created a character primarily for her own catharsis but also for the very beneficial catharsis of anyone who has grown up a victim to a father’s untrammelled passions. For that, it should be more widely read because I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there who would relate and find voice to their hurts in the pleas of wife Henny and eldest daughter Louie.

While I found the prose to be a bit tedious at times (I’m not a fan of lengthy narratives in some childish argot about nothing around the dinner table), the strength of the characters more than makes up for this. I found my sympathies lying most with the eldest girl (I’m an eldest boy) and can very much relate to her decision at the end of the novel.

By that point, I was so nauseated by Sam Pollit, I was glad, like her, to see the back of him and the whole crumbling edifice they called “home.” This novel showed me that there are far worse fates than to lose your family by being sent overseas to boarding school from the age of 11 and, for that, I’m grateful I’ve read it. ( )

I thought I was in for a literary treat when I read this savagely lush description on page 7:

[E]very room was a phial of revelation to be poured out some feverish night in the secret laboratories of her decisions, full of living cancers of insult, leprosies of disillusion, abscesses of grudge, gangrene of nevermore, quintan fevers of divorce, and all the proliferating miseries, the running sores and thick scabs, for which (and not for its heavenly joys) the flesh of marriage is so heavily veiled and conventionally interned.

Disturbing imagery, yes, but it reminded me of the artfully controlled mad excesses of Look Homeward, Angel, and I thought I'd stay with it to see where it went.

I made it all the way to page 30, with considerable difficulty, and then just gave it up. And this is one of the very few (not so many as ten) books that I will take some satisfaction in placing in the recycle bin and not trying to palm off on anybody, not even in a box labeled "Free" at the curb.

The reason: the gaggingly awful speech mannerisms of principal character Sam. He has horrible nicknames for his children ("Loozy," "Little-Womey") and affects a phony dialect that makes him sound like a demented babbler in a madhouse of overage babies. It is so staggeringly obnoxious that I would be hoping on every page for the story to turn out to be a slasher novel with six kinds of violent mayhem in store for our Sam. Five hundred pages of this? I need peace in my life, not the vision of a character who makes a good old-fashioned evildoer look like more pleasant company for my reading hours. How could an author even bear to create a character whose dialogue is so sickeningly loathsome that a hopeful, receptive reader turns away in disgust?

Never mind, I don't want to know.

slow start but got very interesting as it went along. ( )

I found this a real trudge at first, and really struggled to get into it. It seems to hit its stride around halfway through when they family are plunged into further poverty and have to move to a terrible tumbledown house. Some of the set pieces are fantastically well observed, dark and funny. The ones that stand out for me are the awful family gathering after Sam returns from Malaya, and the excruciating visit from Louisa's teacher. But I think it's a little too long and Sam was a bit too grating. I find it very odd she wrote it set in Australia and then transplanted it to the US! ( )

One of my all time hated books! People say it is a book for writers. Well, I write and I couldn't even read it never mind draw inspirhttp://www.librarything.com/work/104720/summary/134944894#ation from it. ( )

from Katha Pollitt and Marjorie Williams' discussion at Slate: "It is one of the greatest novels about childhood I have ever read. Actually, it is one of the greatest novels I have ever read -- it should be just as well-known as Ulysses or To the Lighthouse as a classic of twentieth-century literature in English. It is overwhelming, extravagant, glittering, bitter, and furious. Stead applies a gimlet eye to everything, from the beauties of the Maryland shore to the precise emotional flow of every single interaction of a household tearing its members apart."

This novel was a little difficult to get into - Stead's writing style, at least to me, just didn't flow. Although this book had an interesting take on life with the Pollets, none of the characters were very likable, and that's okay, and I became really disinterested in Sam's (the father) character. So I started skipping sections that were devoted to him. I was interested in Henny and Louie, but not enough to finish the book. I stopped reading about half way through. I neither liked nor disliked the book, just lost interest. ( )