The Man Who Loved Children (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
I finally got to the SLAP moment. What is the SLAP moment? It is when you are reading a longish book and thinking you hate the fucking thing but it’s not quiiiiiiiiiite bad enough to say THAT’S ENOUGH and there are these great billowing clouds of praise and for this thing urging you onwards and you’re looking, looking for the scene, the page, the paragraph which will make you stop dead and say THUS FAR AND NO FARTHER…. It finally happened to me in my reading of The Slap, so now I call it a SLAP moment. In The Slap it was the scene where Gary, the sex-starved husband, is wrestling with his young son for control of the mother’s breasts – please feel free to check my review which goes into some detail, but have a sick bag handy. In The Man who Loved Children, the SLAP moment arrived on page 133-134. It’s worth discussing in detail because this is a very well-loved book and I feel like a right pillock in not being able to join with the glad band of happy four and five star bestowers. I feel I’ve let the side down. I don’t feel good.But fucking hell, guys, seriously?You’ll all know that this long novel is about a husband named Sam who hates his wife Henny who returns the hatred with interest. Between them they have 6 children. The novel is about this family. Everyone uses the word “dysfunctional” to describe this family but I think that word, along with “subversive”, should be retired to the Home for Worn-Out Words because never have I heard a family described as “functional” and if one was the members thereof would probably feel mildly insulted, so “dysfunctional” is another horrible modern cliché, let’s find a different word.Vast swathes of this novel are about the insufferably pompous, all-knowing, all-self-regarding, all-put-upon, all-martyred, all-wise father Sam and his creepy babytalk with the kids. Other swathes are Henny’s sudden diatribes about how she wants to kill Sam, boil the children and throw herself in the Potomac. At least I could get behind Henny’s sentiments, because if I was her, I’d be thinking the same thing.I have read too many novels which describe in detail some insufferable male and his Everest- sized ego, from I the Supreme to John Hawkes’ Travesty to The Book of Evidence to Money and I don’t need another one, but especially when they indulge in this pukesome babytalk. Sam the father is speaking to his 11 year old daughter. The words in [brackets] are in the text.“Will you miss your poor little dad?”“Yes,” she lowered her eyes in confusion.“Bring up your tea, Looloo-girl : I’m sick, hot head, nedache [headache], dot pagans in my stumjack [got pains in my stomach]: want my little fambly around me this morning. We’ll have a corroboree afterwards when I get better. Mother will make the porridge.”You see she has to translate the babytalk as she goes along. So this stuff gets going very early on and you have to be pretty iron-willed to plough through it. I kept repeating the mantra “neglected modern classic”.But it doesn’t stop. Sam never shuts up. He’s supposed to be going off on a nine month foreign trip but by page 134 he’s still there. In fact only 48 hours has passed since page 1. Yeah. So here’s where I stopped. He’s talking to 11 year old Louise again and explaining exactly how and why her mother and father hate each other, in the course of which Louise queries Sam’s relativism in regard to the act of murder :“The Polynesians don’t think it’s murder: you said so. Old women collect money, then they get a young man to murder them and bury them. You said so. You said, it doesn’t matter if the people in the country don’t mind it.”“Oh! Yes I did say that, Looloo, murder depends upon the meridian, so to speak : the thousand and one tables of morality (when we objectively consider the facts of ethnic mores), teach us not to be hidebound about our own little prejudices, even in law. Consider what is supposed to be a heinous offence, murder. Now call it war, and it becomes a patriotic duty to urge other people to go and murder and be murdered. Foolish old Jo, who is a goodhearted woman, sent dozens of white feathers during the Late Unpleasantness or, in other words, desired young men to go and be murdered. En she could hev done with a young man herself: it was a combination of the sacred folly of race suicide, wilful sterility, and murder. En ebblyone thought Jo was a big gun of patriotism : I bleeve your little foolish Aunt Jo will get herself ‘lected to the DAR’s yet – she’s bin and discovered a Pollit what had no more sense than to go and fight long time ago…Now, wimmin is prone to murder. In wicked old Europe still, you get the village witch planning to murder husbings for them wives what is a bit tired of making coffee for the old man.”There are pages of shite like this. What are we to make of it? That Sam is a monstrous parent, yes. That he just uses his kids to broadcast monologues on all frequencies because he’s in love with his own voice, yes. That the kids themselves love him in spite of his egregiousness, yes. That this is in any tiny shred of a way representative of the real world? I hope not. He segues from patronising this 11 year old girl with babytalk to pontificating way above her head and back again. Okay we get this point, he’s awful. But by page 134 this same point had been made about 134 times. I did not wish to listen to another word. I wanted Looloo to turn into Hayley Stark in Hard Candy and lash him to a chair and threaten to chop his goolies off. Anything to stop that endlessly gurgling crap."Shut the fuck up, jackass."
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. That led to discovering Fox’s amazing catalog of children’s books. Just before the release of ‘Freedom,’ Franzen wrote an appreciation of Christina Stead’s ‘The Man Who Loved Children’ in the New York Times. I put off reading it, because I wanted to read Stead's book first. Now that has happened. I’m here to tell you to trust Jonathan Franzen’s recommendations. Corrosive, harrowing, exhilarating, pathetic, sympathetic, comic, heartbreaking, real to the bone, ‘The Man Who Loved Children’ is like nothing else. It’s truly a masterpiece. Franzen notes the ‘long and dazzling’ essay by Randall Jarrell that prefaces the 1965 edition, and points out ‘one very good reason to read the novel is that you can then read Jarrell’s introduction.’ The same goes for Franzen’s excellent, and lengthy, piece in the Times. The time to stop and think about what this book means is after you’ve read it.You surely won’t be able to as you read ‘The Man Who Loved Children.’ It grasps you in the strongest of grips, refusing to let you go until its perfect, dazzling, dizzying ending. Written in 1940, it is absolutely modern. Over 500 pages long, it is still spare, naked and brutal, yet replete with extremely acute observation rendered in gorgeous, precise language. The book starts with a scene of charming normality: ‘All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit’s children were on the lookout for him as they skated round the dirt sidewalks of and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home.’ Pollit is a marine biologist who works for the government, and the proud father of five children running amok in a rambling old house in a pleasantly lazy Washington, D.C., neighborhood. Lest you think you’re in an Eleanor Estes novel, Stead zooms in on a far less cozy picture. It’s ‘The Moffats Meet Blue Velvet.’A large man of overpowering whiteness, unbearably earnest, Sam Pollitt is the kind of person who takes up all the space in a room, not by getting in your face so much as by his total assurance that he is always completely right. He controls his family with a sort of benign ruthlessness, using a self-invented language of neologisms drawn from baby talk and Artemus Ward, and naïve social theory that mashes up More, Malthus and Marx. He’s cruel and scary, deviously gentle and kind of likable in the way that magnificent failures can be.You’d think such a title character would be the dominant one. But Sam’s candle merely flickers next to the fierceness of his wife, Henny, not fooled for an instant by her husband’s genial front, just barely putting up with the ugly cul de sac in which she finds herself. Nothing but bitter truth for bitter Henny, painfully honest even as she desperately seeks some kind of happiness in a tawdry affair and shopping sprees financed by worthless IOUs, sometimes issued to her own small children. Henny runs toward her own destruction with determined authority. The reader can’t look away, and her children can’t stop loving this remarkable and mysterious woman. The Pollitt children are just as endearing as those in any Estes novel, and just as authentic, managing the best they can, sometimes thriving, in this dysfunctional domestic nightmare. Which brings me to the unlikely star of ‘The Man Who Loved Children,’ sluggish, clumsy, heavyset, plodding Louisa. A dreamy young adolescent with a wealth of unrealized dreams, Louie, it turns out, has the soul and the intelligence to make them come true. And the cold-bloodedness. She’s a girl who can kill a cat and then sleep soundly. She certainly realizes that she does not want to be her father’s daughter, although she has to struggle to escape him. Louie screams out that she is the ugly duckling, and at heart, ‘The Man Who Loved Children’ is an ugly duckling story, with all the brooding darkness and calamitous, bizarre episodes that people sometimes forget are a major part of Hans Christian Andersen tales. Stead tells her tale in unforgettable prose, always framing places and people with exactly the right words and comparisons, and in unforgettable events, building in a riveting momentum, one after the other. They’re events that leave the surprised reader open-mouthed in shock, laughing in appreciation, and appalled at the hurt and sadness. Cat-killing is just the beginning.Highly recommended.
What do You think about The Man Who Loved Children (2001)?
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 think, "Hey, I've been to that intersection!" Although surely it's nowhere near the same as it was in those days.As for the book itself, I've given it four stars in spite of the fact that I found myself skimming large portions even on the first read. There are parts that I really couldn't take, most notably parts that were Sam using his "kidspeak" (at first an endearing trait until you realize it's about all he can do - which is how it is for the characters as well.) The family it shows you without painting the full picture is fascinating and depressing. You kind of sympathize with everyone even though they all seem to hate one another. And it rolls along mostly following one character's head then abruptly gives you a different perspective and showing that things aren't as rosy as Sam makes them seem. In fact, pretty much everyone here is crazy, which is probably why the resolution is so depressing. For my money the most heartbreaking part is when the oldest son (who is 12 at this point, I think) finally realizes what's going on. It's an awful fall for an old-money family - a story which I suppose was not uncommon at that time.That's two depressing family life books in a row. I sure hope one of the remaining Time 100 books makes me laugh. This is going to start to get to me soon.
—Mark
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 and Louie especially – so weigh down the text that the paperback swells to ten times its size, pulpy with flesh and blood. It babbles and complains when left alone on the desk. It shouts for tea and sings and sweats and coughs on you when you open it to read.If the book has its faults – and there are plenty of people, like Randall Jarrell in his introduction (better read as an afterword), glad to point them out to you – they are nature’s own: gratuitous detail, excess of vitality, general overabundance. Rather than leaving a sloppy mess, the book manages to reproduce life where life exceeds art while still fully containing it.
—Douglas Dalrymple
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 home, and I found the novel engrossing and compelling, without finding it the easiest of reads. In his misplaced sense of superiority, he neither notices nor cares that his children go hungry and are badly dressed, and that his wife distresses herself to meet his needs. Pushed to her limits, his wife, Henny, has become bitter and hopeless. Essentially she lacks the strength of character to weather her own poverty. Sam truly believes his children adore him because they could ask for nothing more in a father, when all the while not realising that they are simply children, and know no better. He believes that he understands them like no other, while in reality he fails to meet their basic wants and needs. And as they grow into adults, the children begin to see through his fine feathers, rebelling in the way only desperate children can. And in the end, we are left wondering if that will set them free.
—Jennyfleur
