The Man Who Loved Children in The Roundtable

May 17, 2016 Lark Benobi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: bookclub, favorites-20th-century, amazingly-disturbing-5-star-reads

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."

More than any read I can remember, 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 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."

More than any read I can remember, 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 such a dreadful father, and yet he thrives on attention of his children, and his children adore him even when he is his most self-centered and cruel. Only Louisa, the eldest, begins to see through him, and her journey and 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- in the company of those parents who have not ever wondered, however much I love my children, what it would have been like to have lived a life without them, what I might have achieved or enjoyed if I didn't have an obligation to love and care for them. Just having had that skinny thought in my head, in my past, 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, in the way only a great, classic tragedy can be.

My original 1-star review, below the line.
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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. ...more

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