- Paperback: 576 pages
- Publisher: Picador USA; 1 Reprint edition (6 July 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0312280440
- ISBN-13: 978-0312280444
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 13.8 x 3.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 345,087 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
She could transmute personal experience into something of both social and psychological significance … She was one of the great originals --The Times
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Set in Baltimore in the 1930s, this novel tells of American family life, of the relations between parents and children, husbands and wives.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
34 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
How is it possible this masterpiece has no reviews? I'm not her only fan - Saul Bellow, Angela Carter and Doris Lessing are too, and the poet Randall Jarrell wrote an astounding introduction to this book. Based on Stead's own childhood struggle with her father, it is about the flint-eyed Louisa, plain changeling in a family overburdened with children thanks to her hypocritical, overbearing and monstrous father Sam Pollit. Their quarrels, feelings, smells and near-madness are portrayed with savage satirical wit and detail. As Jarrell said, "The Man Who Loved Chiuldren makes you a part of one family's immediate existence as no other book quite does. When you have read it you have been, for a few hours, a Pollit; it will take you many years to get the sound of the Polits out of your ears, the sight of the Pollits out of your eyes, the smell of the Pollits out of your nostrils."
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
25 reviews
87 of 88 people found the following review helpful
Deep insights into human nature but overlong
26 Sep 1999
Format:Paperback
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.
48 of 50 people found the following review helpful
The Excessive Portrait of a Dark and Troubled Family
3 Jan 2001
Format:Paperback
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.
37 of 39 people found the following review helpful
A masterpiece sadly ignored by most literary readers.
15 Oct 1998
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
"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.
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