Here you have it: the great ‘Dad, you’re a pig; oh, and tell Mom I hate her too’ novel. I have never been family orientated. I am often criticised by my own for avoiding get-togethers, for not buying all my relatives cards on their birthdays etc. The thing is, I simply find absurd the idea of being tied to strange people, of having to spend time with people I have absolutely nothing in common with, some of whom I actively dislike, merely because we share a bloodline.

So, yeah, family isn’t my th More...

I have to admit that my reading of this book did not do it justice: I've been busy, and tired, and I took a big long break in the middle because I had to finish another book, and it's very long. But: it is so very excellent.

I read somewhere that books about families are often shoved into a little, neglected category of their own - usually called 'domestic fiction' or something similar. I wonder if I'm not guilty of this myself, with my 'family-drama' shelf. I meant it originally for books like O More...

It's a travesty that this novel isn't one of those twentieth-century classics that everyone's heard of and has either read or knows they must read, like "The Sound and the Fury" or "Ulysses." Sure, people, praise it, but in the same way that Jonathan Franzen praises Alice Munro: with patronizing awe, not peerage. I don't know that Christina Stead ever wrote anything nearly as good, but "The Man Who Loved Children" is epic and brilliant -- strange, gorgeous, devastating, hilarious, flawed, origin More...

The greatest novel I've ever read about a certain type of family life. Stead is simultaneously intimate and expansive: it's like we're reading an adaptation of some deep myth or television sitcom. Bonus: Sam's "little language," the familyspeak that swamps Hetty because her own is so much less vigorous. And that's what I love about the book. It's like Christina Stead took all of American culture and spirit, wrapped it up into a single character (Sam Pollit), and then blew it off her finger. Sam More...

A family is a language to itself, but from dumb beginnings and single-syllables, any child of the house moves inevitably to perfect fluency. Reading Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children is something like being born into the Pollit household yourself: you are mesmerized and disoriented by a dialect, a cadence, a register that mysteriously cohere to become a world.

Stead’s verbal exuberance is astonishing, of a caliber (perhaps) with Melville or Shakespeare. Her characters – Sam and Henny More...

This is one of the great, largely unread books of (more or less) our time. Originally published in 1940, it was dismissed by both critics and public. Randall Jarrell gave it a bit of a revival in the 60s (and a perceptive introduction, reproduced in the new edition) and Jonathan Franzen recently gave the novel high praise in the New York Times Book Review, saying that its depiction of the psychological violence of family life "makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond." It is a More...

I am still chugging along faithfully. i am now nearly half-way through. Sam Pollit and Henny Pollit are such unlikeable characters but the book illustrates Tolstoy's claim that Happy Family are all alike but unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways. Stead's book drags you through not only and unhappy family but one might say miserable. Sam is a self-obsessed man who sees himself as a great father and lover of all fellow human beings but is so stuck inside himself that he cannot see how he More...

You immediately become aware when reading this book how much Christina Stead might be thought to have been in need of a creative writing class or, indeed, a strong editor, as this crazy novel sprawls, messy, repetitive, overlong in many places - but how grateful we should be that she didn't have these alleged benefits as her genius rampages across the verbose pages. This goes for all her books really, but Children is her masterpiece and it comes as life does, straight at you with no time for org More...

The Man Who Loved Children has long been one of my mother's favourite books, and a well-thumbed, dog-eared copy is one of my most vivid memories from childhood. And yet, somehow, I wasn't ever quite ready to read it until recently. Perhaps now I have finally stopped believing in bogeymen and monsters hiding in cupboards, and could read with some sense of detachment. There is something in Sam Pollit, a man who drags his wife and children through the most extreme of poverty, that hits close to hom More...

There are so many wonderfully developed, opposing characters in The Man Who Loved Children that it's hard to know where to start. This is a family as dysfunctional as any in Tolstoy (or even Tolstoy's own! I can just imagine him chanting "when she walks she wobbles" at fat relatives) and as confrontational as any Dostoevsky one. The Pollits are arrogant, eugenicist Sam and his indebted, depressed wife Henny. Sam, a bit of a shiftless layabout who has muddled along as a government naturalist, has More...

i actually did not read this version with the randall jarrel introduction-doris lessing did the intro in my version. i would like to read randall jarrell's introduction though. and i digress.

i liked this book a lot-it came to me from a list of books recommended by John Waters in his memoir. While reading Man who loved children I read a few things about it and about Christina Stead, including a review in the NYTimes by Jonathan Franzen who really liked this book. It is painful to read at times-cr More...

Appealing to my inherent Baltimore and Maryland vanity gets any novel a long way, and when I read very early on a passage talking about that "wretched slum east of Baltimore, Dundalk," this one was on my good side. In fact I was tickled to see that sentence from a book that was published in 1940. I guess not much has changed. Assorted comments made by Baltimore-raised characters about the denizens of Washington, DC only further endeared me to this book - along with naming streets where I can thi More...

Jonathan Franzen—everyone who reads knows who he is, don’t they? Second novel as wildly popular as the first, cover of TIME. Yet no one seems to admit that they like him.

Say what you like about his prickly personality, Franzen always seems willing to subsume his ego in the service of unrecognized writers whom he feels deserve the same attention he gets. I might never have read Paula Fox’s ‘Desperate Characters,’ had not Franzen touted it in a number of interviews when ‘The Corrections’ came out. More...

This the best, most real, most exhausting book about family that I have ever read. We see and hear what the children do, as well as the scenes between Henny, the dried up skinny mother of 7, and the egocentric, fat, megalomaniac father, Sam. Stead's writing is, by turns, Biblical or Shakespearian in rage, and Dostoyevskyan in bombast

. Randall Jarrett, who wrote the preface for this edition, says that it is the best book about how children see the world and says he has read it over and over again More...

This is a strange book. My knowledge of Australian based or influence literature is very lacking. The writer, Stead, was born down under but the book takes place in Washington. So really what is it? It reads like magic realism, but it’s not really. In some ways, Stead reminds me of Angela Carter with a slightly less dark and gothic. Then again, it reminds me of a more tragic version of Monty Python.
Then again, another turn, it reminds me life.
The novel tells the story of Louie who lives with h More...

This is the most enjoyable (and ultimately satisfying) novel about thoroughly unlikable people I have yet read. The man of the title, Sam Pollit, hides his totalitarian rule over his children behind goofiness and baby-talk, while his bitter and disappointed wife, Henny, goes on long, hateful tirades. Stuck in the middle are their children, each struggling in their individual ways to make sense of the world and the vicious push-pull of their parents. Sounds enjoyable, right? Sam, especially, frus More...

The Man Who Loved Children - it's like a TARDIS. From the outside, it looks like a reasonably big novel. But once you get inside, you realise it's huge. The scale of this novel is completely staggering. It's an entire world of its own. Like a fantasy novel, it has its own language, its own geography...if I - horror of horrors - woke up in the Pollit house tomorrow, I know I could find my way around. Stead makes everything so clear.

But let me make this perfectly clear - this is one bleak novel. I More...

This almost overly long, tedious novel is almost too onerous to finish. The characters are fascinating, the writing is beautifully done but the lack of any real plot and the seemingly lack of any direction to the story quickly made me want to put this book away and only pick it up again when I had run out of anything else to read. The glowing review by Jonathan Franzen should have given me a clue that this would not be a novel I would like, I have never been able to get past the first 100 or so More...

Una famiglia del tutto squinternata, con una madre inetta, pazza, eppure più umana del padre, che nella sua apparente rettitudine e nella sua ossessione per i figli alla fine si rivela un mostro, incapace di umanità, e del tutto infantile.
Se ne renderà conto la figlia maggiore di questo padre, che, dopo aver ucciso, quasi a liberarla dalle sofferenze, la matrigna, se ne andrà lontano da quel padre che la ama tanto, al punto da non permetterle di essere se stessa.
Il libro è un enorme affresco sul More...

This is a tricky book to review as the introduction to the family, its truly dreadful secret language and the level of dysfunction add up to something that is not pleasant reading. However, Christina Stead gradually makes the reader more comfortable with these elements and also adds more tension and action around the middle of the book. Fortunately, I stuck with it and the entire work is something that will stay with me a long time. It must have been de rigueur for parents to tease, pinch, ridic More...

I at one point became furious with the book! Much of the early family drama was incomprehensible to me; at one point I actually said "I don't understand a single word." In hindsight, that felt like reading through some Melville whale arcana. But doesn't everyone skip that? My girlfriend maintains that she actually read it all. Ha! I don't believe her.

Most of all, the book offered me a vision of how the description of subjective experience, rediscovering one's oppressed voice, can turn into an ex More...

Perhaps I was naive to be so shocked by this grotesque 1940s tale of chaos and family dysfunction set in D.C. Baltimore heiress Henrietta Collyer is married off to a zany, hardscrabble conservationist named Sam Pollit -- and what follows is an explosively unhappy (if high-yielding) marriage. I'll be damned if almost every page didn't made me cringe: the father's narcissism, the mother's hysteria, the sheer filth of their encroaching poverty, the childrens' constant suffering and neglect. It abou More...

This novel is the dysfunctional family writ large. Dad is a civil servant naturalist with superficially benevolent ideas about the world and mankind, but with a heavy dose of sexism, a leaning toward eugenics, a disdain for literature, and most importantly a massive dose of narcissism hidden beneath the superficial shell. He looks initially like a fun dad, ring-master of "family fun day" on Sundays, and seemingly the younger kids enjoy him, but he contributes to the impoverishment of the family, More...

This was another hard book to challenge myself, like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I got to page 69 and I just wanted something to happen. I get it, everybody's miserable and they all hate each other.

I gave up. Do I get to count it as "read"? I didn't mind that the characters weren't likeable, but I wanted something to happen, and I realized I was dreading opening it for my morning read on the exercise bike. So I started an easy book about trash pickers in New York (Mongo). Later I flipped thro More...

As good and as brutal on childhood as Cat's Eye.

This novel is a masterpiece of the highest order and I hadn't heard of it until I read Jonathan Franzen's excellent article recently in the Times, nor had I heard of the author. The book is about a family with so many issues it's frankly amazing they can exist together under one roof. Each and every sentence is beautifully rendered with a real eye for style and narrative energy. If you think your family has problems, read this book and rejoice in your normality. How this book didn't win the Puli More...

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 ever More...

I'm not nearly as averse to "unlikeable" characters as some readers are. People are unlikeable. When I read fiction about likeable people, I sort of have the sense that I'm being lied to, or that the characters are being strategically misrepresented. Not that veracity is fiction's best goal.

There's a lot of other stuff going on in this book. JFranz's stewardship might do the book more harm than good. Stead is much more interested in language than Franzen ever could be. Sam manufactures his fami More...

A huge, hilarious, disturbing book filled with good things - language, scenes, insights. The history of the endless war between a disastrously mismatched husband and wife: Henny, terminally bilious, subversive, and wrathful and Sam, a self-professed rationalist and idealist, an overgrown child, and a monstrously self-satisfied but cheerful tyrant. Between the two is the oldest child, Louise, who pores her energy into resisting her parents' seductions and manipulations and suffers for the effort. More...