The Man Who Loved Children

By Christina Stead and Michael Schmidt

All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit's children were on the lookout for him as they skated round the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road...

Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money and too much loathing for each other. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny becomes a geyser of rage against her improvident husband. And, caught in the midst of it all, is Louisa, Sam's watchful eleven-year-old daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Apr 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784971700

Christina Stead

Christina Stead (1902–1983) was an Australian writer regarded as one of the twentieth century’s master novelists. Stead spent most of her writing life in Europe and the United States, and her varied residences acted as the settings for a number of her novels. She is best known for The Man Who Loved Children (1940), which was praised by author Jonathan Franzen as a “crazy, gorgeous family novel” and “one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.” Stead died in her native Australia in 1983.

Reviews for The Man Who Loved Children

[lauralkeet · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a most unusual family drama, simultaneously frightening, funny, and intense. Sam and Henny Pollit have six children. Eldest daughter Louisa was a product of Sam's first marriage; Henny has been nothing more than Sam's brood mare, spawning an assortment of children that offer endless amusement to Sam and endless stress and torment to Henny. Sam is self-centered and without a care in the world; he prides himself on being the "fun" parent, organizing all manner of escapades with his children. He speaks in a language all his own, full of cutesy nicknames and odd turns of phrase. Henny grew up in a wealthy family, and cannot accept the reduced circumstances of her life with Sam. She lives beyond their means, both materially and socially.Sam and Henny neglect many of the practicalities associated with raising a family. At 13, Louisa is far too young to shoulder these responsibilities and yet there she is, fixing breakfast every day, and making sure the household runs smoothly. Henny has never accepted Louisa into the family, and verbally abuses her. Sam showers her with pet names like Looloo, but also smothers her with his prying and controlling behaviors. Louisa longs for summer holidays, when she stays with her mother's family:For nine months of the year were trivial miseries, self-doubts, indecisions, and all those disgusts of preadolescence, when the body is dirty, the world a misfit, the moral sense qualmish, and the mind a sump of doubt: but three months of the year she lived in trust, confidence, and love. (p. 163)Sam and Henny have such a poor relationship that all communication occurs through their children. Even Sam's impending posting to Malaya is communicated to Henny via her eldest son. And when they argue, all hell breaks loose:When a quarrel started (Henny and Sam did speak at the height of their most violent quarrels) and elementary truths were spoken, a quiet, a lull would fall over the house. One would hear, while Henny was gasping for indignant breath and while Sam was biting his lip in stern scorn, the sparrows chipping, or the startling rattle of the kingfisher, or even an oar sedately dipping past the beach, or even the ferry's hoot. Exquisite were these moments. Then the tornado would break loose again. What a strange life it was for them, those quiet children, in this shaded house, in a bower of trees, with the sunny orchard shining, the calm sky and silky creek, with sunshine outside and shrieks of madness inside. (p. 326)Louisa often finds herself caught in the middle of this marital drama, trying to break up the fights and protect the younger children. While Sam is away in Malaya, life settles into some semblance of order, and on his return it seems as if normalcy will continue. But a series of events dramatically change the family's place in the community. Sam and Henny are unable to work through this together, and when Sam takes charge you just know it won't end well. Louisa continues to serve as a stabilizing force, but increasingly resents Sam's intrusion and control.By now the "frightening" and "intense" elements of this novel should be clear. It's strange and uncomfortable to admit that in the midst of all this, there are funny elements as well. Sam is larger than life. He's a complete prat and yet amusing and likable. He and Henny share equally in their family's dysfunction, and as much as she's a victim of Sam's ridiculous notions, I couldn't help liking Sam more. But Sam does some really awful things to his children, things that (if they were real people) would scar them for life. As a reader, I felt really conflicted, which I think is by design. Christina Stead is able to make the reader feel like one of Sam and Henny's many children -- fond of both parents, hurt and abused, and completely caught in the middle.This is not an easy book to read, but not for the reasons you might think. Yes, the subject matter is difficult, and it's a bit like watching an impending train wreck. But the prose also makes its demands on the reader, particularly Sam's invented language. However, those willing to invest the time and effort in this book will be rewarded in the end.

[lizaha_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I kept wishing that I could stop reading this book because it was so ugly, but I couldn't because it was too compelling. It almost physically hurt to read it because it is just bursting with too many sights, too many smells, too much STUFF all falling apart and disintegrating, things falling apart, children scrambling for any kind of understanding, and all this roly-poly, hurdy-gurdy dialog tripping along, ugh. And nothing has so much brought back for me the sensation of being a child in a family, but the truth is, I don't really want that sensation. You know how Tolstoy is bursting full of life in a happy way, and even what's sinister is endearing? The Man Who Loved Children reads a little bit like a refutation, where even what might be endearing is sinister, and the only possible respite comes from the ability to stare the ugly truth in the face and see it for what it is. It is bursting full of a kind of life, but it is a life more like decay. Well, in conclusion, I think this was a very good novel and showed a certain angle of truth extraordinarily well, but thank god there are other angles too.

[ursula_2 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I was a little hesitant when I saw that this book had a blurb from Jonathan Franzen on the cover. But, I told myself, don't let that influence your opinion of the book, because even people you don't like can like the same things you do. Maybe this book will be the tiny kernel of commonality you never wanted between you and Jonathan Franzen, who knows?This book is not the tiny kernel of commonality between Jonathan Franzen and me. I loathed it. I loathed everyone in it. I loathed the way it was written. Every single thing about it, I hated.The title character is the patriarch of the Pollit family, Sam. Or Sam the Bold, as he likes to refer to himself. He has a passel of children from his current marriage to Henny, who comes from a socially-prominent family and took a big step down to marry him. He also has one daughter from his first marriage (his first wife, his true love apparently, died). Sam likes to think of himself as fun-loving, principled, and right-thinking. He speaks to his children in incessant babytalk for some reason. Because he thinks it's cute? Because he is a child himself? Because the author really liked to write sentences that have to be sounded out to be understood, while at the same time making the reader feel like a fool for what he or she is now saying?I cannot even think about this book any more. I understand where the author was going with it, but I got absolutely no pleasure, enjoyment, or enlightenment out of any of it. The lack of likable characters isn't a dealbreaker to me, but the ones in this book were so irritating to me that every page seemed like an eternity and even as the threads of the story came together, it all felt pointless. Recommended for: masochists.Quote: "But women have been brought up much like slaves, that is, to lie."

[mahallett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

slow start but got very interesting as it went along.

[jandl_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a perfectly disturbing and most excellent book! What really got to me was how I started picking up Sam's speech patterns, how much that character stayed in my head! Strong writing. Give it another chance if it feels strange. It took me one false start before I was willing and able to stick with it.

[pewterbreath · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is Running With Scissors before Running With Scissors--a fictionalized account of a dysfunctional family. The mother is the character I watch, electrifying every scene she's in. Basically it's about a man who keeps a group of children around him in order to be the expert--what at first seems nice ends up being him stroking his own ego.

[thewasp_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After Sam Pollit's wife died leaving him with baby Louise,he married Henrietta, and produced another six children. Sam loved his children and used them to nourish his immature and egocentric nature. As his brood of children grew, Henny's ability to cope with her children and husband diminish to either not talking and relaying messages to Sam via the children, or uncontrolled verbal screaming matches.Her ascerbic vitriol is also leveled at Louise. When circumstances reduce the family to poverty, there is no escape from the escalating destruction of the family's relationship.Of all the children, we really only get to know Louise but her pain at being the stepchild to a mother who is nasty and a father who is obliviously hurtful is clearly potrayed.Excellently written.

[piemouth · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

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. 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 through it (not even skimmed, it's too long) and read the ending. Huh.I just didn't see it as the masterpiece it's supposed to be. I'll read the Randall Jarrell introduction and the recent Jonathan Lethem essay in the NY Times. Maybe someday I'll be mature enough to appreciate it.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am not quite sure where to begin with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. Let’s just say this book will not make my list of favorite reads. The novel was originally published in 1940 and is about a highly dysfunctional family. It is difficult to say which character deadens the soul more, with the contest being between Sam Pollit, the father, who is a narcissistic egotist that talks to his children in highly annoying baby talk, and his wife, Henny, the mother, with her whiny negativity, resentments and many threats of suicide or infanticide.The family begins the book living in a run-down Georgetown house in Washington, D.C. There is a distinct lack of money, sense and love in this family. Nevertheless, she pulls no punches and we read page after page of Sam’s baby talk and Henny’s bitter outbursts leaving the reader feeling like that have just gone through 10 rounds in a boxing ring. The loathing between Sam and Henny made this a very chilling read. I was overwhelmed by this sprawling, exhausting story but I do admire how the author delivered these deeply flawed, highly unlikable characters and managed to mostly hold my interest. I understand that the author based the characters on her own family, with herself as the oldest daughter, Louisa. If this is true, than, believe me, she has my greatest sympathy. I would have preferred the book to have been shorter but The Man Who Loved Children did vividly and painfully display the structure and the inner life of a disintegrating family and in that, was rather brilliant.

[amerynth · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I just couldn't get into Christina Steads' (the horribly titled) "The Man who Loved Children." I really wanted to like this book, but found myself just struggling to read it page after page. I think it was the writing itself that really made this difficult for me.The Pollits are an extremely dysfunctional family -- Henny and Sam haven't really spoken in years except to bark at each other. The impact of their circumstances is felt differently by each member of their large family. Sam and Henny are both brutal characters in their own separate ways. I had a hard time with Sam, who talks in baby talk to his children and has a creepy way of interacting with them that I really disliked. I liked the ideas and the central story in this one, but not the way it was written, if that makes any sense.

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

At first I thought this was going to annoy me bvery much - and, in places, it did. Sam, the father of the family, is very annoying. He loves his children, he thinks he is great with them, but, in reality, he is self centred, foolish and stifles them. He is the child who has never grown up and so has never learnt to cope with the adult world, and so never shoulders his parental responsibilities. This is reflected in the several conversations he has with Louie, the oldest child, on the cusp of womanhood, he contirnues to call her by her childhood nickname, to belittle her and to make feel worthless in comparison to him. Every conversation they have seems to come round to Sam and what he needs, it is never about meeting Louie's needs. His behaviour is clearly designed to show how much he is in tune with children, but it doesn;t work. The diminutives for the children work to some extent, but they ought to change as they grow older, and these don't. The private language that each family develops itself, immortalising mispronunciations and so on, again OK, that happens in any family, it's the way that the family language that only Sam uses is a mock baby talk that I found grating, it infantalises the children, probably as Sam is unable to deal with them as individuals that have their own needs and wishes - he sees them as an adjunct to him. Sam's wife if Henny and she is, in some ways, his opposite. Not just dark to his blond, she has an opposite personality, very much more earthbound, practical, more despondant than optomistic. She, however, is the one that gets the family into money troubles and can't get oiut of them, partly as Sam just declines to be involved in any serious conversation about their issues. It is the children that I felt for the most. The oldest two are the most finely drawn, Louie (Louise) and Ernest. They are of different character and temprament Louie looks destined for the stage or literature, Ernest to be an accountant or financial whizz of some description. Both are subdued by their father and torn between the behaviour of the two parents. Not that Henny is entirely innocent either. The scene when Ernest finfs his money box has been emptied is a dreadful betrayal. I can;t say I enjoyed this, the two main characters are far to unpleasant for that to be entirely true. However, it was well written. I felt it got into its stride more at ~ page 200, after Sam had returned from his voyage. The final chapters are a rollercoaster of emotion, although you do finsih feeling that at least Louie will be OK.

[danielstj · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book disappointed me. I expected something great from the rave reviews that I had read, as well as its status on Time's Top 100 Novels series, but I was left with a bittersweet taste on my literary taste. I don't quite understand why the novel was supposed to be engaging and it comes off as a little melodramatic, overdone, and over appreciated. If you are looking for great novels from that list, I would recommend staying clear of this one. 2 stars- not recommended.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good if uncomfortable story of a dysfunctional family in 1930s Washington. Despite the title there is no paedophilic element to the story at all. A story about a toxic couple and their more endearing children. And some great writing to keep the writer company.