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THU., JANUARY 24, 2008
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Lies, Hypocrisy, Barbarism and the Best Novel Ever Written About a Nuclear Family
by Jonathan Franzen
The Man Who Loved Children isn't just one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It's also the best novel ever written about a nuclear family, and as ferocious and damning an assault on the patriarchy as can be found anywhere in world literature. The eponymous Sam Pollit — a husband who subjugates his wife by impregnating her again and again; a champion of the Enlightenment whose home is a horror show of lies, hypocrisy and barbarism; a totalitarian suburban dad who insists that "my children are myself" and “I am my children;” a confirmed sentimentalist who creates his own private language out of babytalk and Joycean cant and Utopian rhetoric and forces his family to speak it — is everything a hard-core feminist could ask for in a fictional patriarch. Everything and more. And this is the problem. As brilliant as Christina Stead is in depicting Sam's misogyny and tyranny, she's no less brilliant in illuminating the weakness and fear and need at the heart of the patriarch, and making us pity him even as we hate him. This is why Stead's masterpiece, instead of becoming the cornerstone of Women's Studies syllabi and the signature text of modern feminism, remains little known outside the ardent circle of admirers who have kept the book in print since its publication in 1940. The novel isn't small enough or one-sided enough to be useful to theorists. The Pollits are too human to fit into a syllabus.
The disaster of their marriage unfolds in the fish-smelling environs of Washington, DC, on the outskirts of Franklin Roosevelt’s federal bureaucracy, sometime in the late '30s. It’s one of those oddities of literature that our finest Washington novel was written by a communist Australian expat who lived in our capital only briefly. The rawness of America seems to have reconnected Stead to her childhood in raw Australia, and it’s obvious from Sam Pollit’s very name, with its echoes of “Uncle Sam” and “politics,” that he is not accidentally situated in the hometown of the Great White Father. For a writer who grew up in Australia and spent most of her adult life in Europe, Stead shows remarkable command of American nuance — she knows the dissolute Southern aristocracy, she knows the moralism and penny-pinching of Sam’s Maryland fish-selling family — and yet her characters are always just un-American enough to feel dreamlike, universal, mythic.
Great novelists are lucky if their oeuvre produces even just one giant character, one Emma Bovary, one Huck Finn, so original and fully realized as to seem realer than real. Christina Stead produced three giant characters in one book. Sam’s wife and bitter nemesis, Henny, is a man-loathing needer of men, a spoiled rich girl with bad morals and worse money-management skills, whose marriage is summed up in her declaration (by no means her most violent), "I'd drink his blood but it would make me vomit." Sam’s oldest child, Louisa (“Louie”), his daughter from an earlier marriage, is the great protofeminist heroine, the artist portrayed as a young woman, the fat, dirty ugly-duckling who's at once heartbreakingly childish and sociopathically implacable — she's the killer whom neighbors call in when a cat needs to be drowned in the bathtub, and she’s the thorn in the side of the patriarch, telling her father, over and over, "You know nothing." And: “None of your children will ever confide in you.” And: “What is fun to you is death to me.”
Whether Sam is chewing up food and forcing it into his grown daughter’s mouth with his tongue, or declaring that it's "natural" and "no harm" for his infant son to eat his own excrement, or dissecting an enormous rotting marlin and employing his children to boil it all night, so that he can extract oil for BIKE OIL, MARLIN BALM, MACHINE-OIL, HAIR-OIL, and LEATHER-GREASE, the basilisk-eyed Louie is always there to witness it. She’s the kind of girl who grew up to be Christina Stead, who was the first and best novelist to record the way unhappy families really speak. The family tragedy in The Man Who Loved Children is also the story one artist’s triumph, written in dazzling prose and unforgettable dialogue and steeped in a comic spirit that seems to cry out, as Louie herself does late in the book, "I love, I love, I only know about love."
The disaster of their marriage unfolds in the fish-smelling environs of Washington, DC, on the outskirts of Franklin Roosevelt’s federal bureaucracy, sometime in the late '30s. It’s one of those oddities of literature that our finest Washington novel was written by a communist Australian expat who lived in our capital only briefly. The rawness of America seems to have reconnected Stead to her childhood in raw Australia, and it’s obvious from Sam Pollit’s very name, with its echoes of “Uncle Sam” and “politics,” that he is not accidentally situated in the hometown of the Great White Father. For a writer who grew up in Australia and spent most of her adult life in Europe, Stead shows remarkable command of American nuance — she knows the dissolute Southern aristocracy, she knows the moralism and penny-pinching of Sam’s Maryland fish-selling family — and yet her characters are always just un-American enough to feel dreamlike, universal, mythic.
Great novelists are lucky if their oeuvre produces even just one giant character, one Emma Bovary, one Huck Finn, so original and fully realized as to seem realer than real. Christina Stead produced three giant characters in one book. Sam’s wife and bitter nemesis, Henny, is a man-loathing needer of men, a spoiled rich girl with bad morals and worse money-management skills, whose marriage is summed up in her declaration (by no means her most violent), "I'd drink his blood but it would make me vomit." Sam’s oldest child, Louisa (“Louie”), his daughter from an earlier marriage, is the great protofeminist heroine, the artist portrayed as a young woman, the fat, dirty ugly-duckling who's at once heartbreakingly childish and sociopathically implacable — she's the killer whom neighbors call in when a cat needs to be drowned in the bathtub, and she’s the thorn in the side of the patriarch, telling her father, over and over, "You know nothing." And: “None of your children will ever confide in you.” And: “What is fun to you is death to me.”
Whether Sam is chewing up food and forcing it into his grown daughter’s mouth with his tongue, or declaring that it's "natural" and "no harm" for his infant son to eat his own excrement, or dissecting an enormous rotting marlin and employing his children to boil it all night, so that he can extract oil for BIKE OIL, MARLIN BALM, MACHINE-OIL, HAIR-OIL, and LEATHER-GREASE, the basilisk-eyed Louie is always there to witness it. She’s the kind of girl who grew up to be Christina Stead, who was the first and best novelist to record the way unhappy families really speak. The family tragedy in The Man Who Loved Children is also the story one artist’s triumph, written in dazzling prose and unforgettable dialogue and steeped in a comic spirit that seems to cry out, as Louie herself does late in the book, "I love, I love, I only know about love."
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