The Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

Book Overview

Every family lives in an evolving story, told by all its members, inside a landscape of portentous events and characters. Their view of themselves is not shared by people looking from outside... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312280440
• ISBN13: 9780312280444
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Couldn't crack the code....

I was reading a book by John Waters of "Hairspray" fame and he listed the 5 best books he has ever read. His list included this book, The Man Who Loved Children. The book is very long, and dense with small print and paragraphs that go on for half the page. I'm afraid I couldn't get past the first 10 pages. I picked it up 4 or 5 times, trying again to see what Mr. Waters found so fascinating. I couldn't do it. And I realized that if I forced myself to read it, with the length of the book I would have wasted several hours of my time when I could have been watching "RuPaul's Drag Race" instead.

Not a fan

I did not finish this book, I tossed this book out. After reading the book reviews and seeing that it was actually a favorite book of a few I thought I would give it a try. Sadly, I found it depressing, repetitive and decided I didn’t care enough about the characters. In its defense I was reading a depressing book during COVID-19.

The Excessive Portrait of a Dark and Troubled Family

Angela Carter, a literary firecracker who had much to say about the dark pathologies of the family, once suggested that if she had to choose a representative statement for the collected works of Christina Stead, she'd quote William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence." And while I have not read the entirety of Stead's fictional work, the appropriateness of Carter's characterization rings true with every word, every narrative turn and stylistic nuance, of Stead's regrettably little-read classic, "The Man Who Loved Children", even though it is a book which veers sharply toward one side of the Blakeian contraries-those of "Repulsion" and "Energy" and "Hate"-in its dialectic."The Man Who Loved Children" tells the story of a family, the Pollitts, who live in the Washington-Baltimore area in the 1930s, in the Age of Roosevelt and the Depression. But to say simply that it tells the story of a family is misleading. For "The Man Who Loved Children" does not merely tell a story, it makes the reader's skin crawl in the discomfiting darkness of a family dominated by discord, disfunction, and abuse. It is is book which deftly, yet idiosyncratically, thrusts the reader into the emotional and psychic turbulence of the family's day-to-day existence, telling its story with a richness and texture of dialogue that is nearly suffocating in its intensity. It is a book whose main character, Sam Pollitt, is so repulsive in the degradation of his hapless wife and the pathological manipulation and abuse of his children, that no less a critic than Randall Jarrell has suggested that it makes the male reader worry, "Ought I to be a man?" And it is, finally, a book which-perhaps more than any other work of fiction-makes the reader wrenchingly experience the saturating discomfort of a familial hell on earth, where the father and mother do not speak to each other (except in argument, abuse or threat) and where each child becomes the emotional victim of this horrible relationship and of their overbearing and manipulative father, Sam, the man who loved children.Christina Stead's vision and writing in "The Man Who Loved Children" is excessive and troubling. It is also profound and memorable, a sharply etched portrait of the dark side of the family.

Deep insights into human nature but overlong

Many years ago I happened to ask a student of mine in Melbourne, a mature woman whom I didn't even know very well, what was the best book that she'd ever read. She replied that it was certainly Christina Stead's THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN. I was stunned because I had never even heard of the author. Eight years later, in the middle of a howling Patagonian wilderness, I traded some bad novels with an Australian traveler for that very book and read it immediately with great anticipation. No doubt this is a great book. The depth of psychological characterization of each member of this painfully dysfunctional (older vocab.=messed up) family is truly amazing. The slow building up of each character absorbs the reader, the ultimate disappointment of all the relationships is a marvelous antidote to the idealistic optimism that prevails in Hollywood and beyond. Still, I felt that the author could have cut some sections, or done away with some extraneous side descriptions. The only other question I have is why Stead chose to write about Americans, with whose language peculiarities she was not so familiar, instead of Australians or even Britishers, whose particular dialects she must have known better. I have never been able to solve this problem because I never meet anyone with whom I could discuss the book. It certainly is one of the least-known great novels of the 20th century.

One of the best novels of the 20th century

This heart-rending novel bleeds. It sweats. It screams. It is so vividly written that you truly feel each character's pain in this most dysfuntional of families. Every character, from the deluded patriarch to his betrayed son, is well drawn and distinct. The plot tightens the screws continually until the climax which is amazing in intensity. I read the last 200 pages of this book in one sitting and was wrung out by the end (the first time a book has ever done that to me!)I note above the criticism that this book has characters offering long baroque speeches. This is probably true. It's also probably too long. Regardless, you will never read a book as vivid, terrifying, painful yet life affirming as this one. It should be read by everyone who loves great literature.

A masterpiece sadly ignored by most literary readers.

"The Man Who Loved Children" is as overwhelming as Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in that it creates the reality in which the reader exists during the time it takes to read it. But it is, in many ways, the obverse of "War and Peace". It is a remarkable depiction of a family, and it moves inward rather than outward. It is a stunning piece of fiction, and is certainly one of the ten best novels of the century. Any real reader should be familiar with this book.

This is a fantastic, rich, gorgeous novel.

The definitive dysfunctional family novel. Unbelievable writing. A great plot, great characters, smart, scathing social commentary. Historical signifance. Kind of a 20th centruy Dickensian novel. If you love Dickens, but want something more modern, this is it.