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korrick 's review for:
The Man Who Loved Children
by Christina Stead
2.5/5
Louie said,I don't entertain myself with media portraits of dysfunctional families. Some proclaim this to be a working model of every family at its heart of hearts; I say that anyone who says this is either a miserly blowhard trying to fit into mass appeal or a sadist-in-waiting looking to voyeuristically vent their frustrated aspirations on their own personal walking, talking financial investments. Having survived a family with many a memory of the scenes that can be drawn from Stead's pages, it's hilarious to me the fervor that has been cast over this work in recent times, looking like little more than a mixture of guilt, Highlanderism (there can only be one Australian/pre 1950's/woman writer/etc on our shelves), and complete and utter sensationalism, especially since the most infamous Stead devotee had to evaluate her Wikipedia portrait before proclaiming her an acceptable read (see the Wharton debacle for a contrasting narrative). All in all, this book really does have some good things to say about the nasty, brutish, and short lifeline of the decline and fall of the white nuclear family in its glory of antiqueerness, and the downright fascism of the patriarch makes the young girl character's bildungsroman (sym)pathetic in its doomed trajectory. Too bad it and the mass media atmosphere that surrounds it is altogether too nasty for me to waste much more time on.
The desolator desolate,
The tyrant overthrown;
The arbiter of other's fate,
A suppliant for his own!
Sam looked at her with a puzzled expression, "Why did you say that?"
She melted into a grin, "I just thought of it.
Poor good man, he thought that he had discovered a new principle...that the rich and powerful are human beings too.What's plain to see is, unless something truly revolutionary happens, the girlchild intended as a vehicle for the reader's compassion is going to go the exact same way as her dear old dad, with merely a literary, white feminism spin on his gleeful eugenics, antisemitism, antiblackness, and general self-idolizing grandeur. It's too bad, then, that the introduction kept moaning about language and myths of dichotomous gender roles, as it's merely one instance of other reader's willfully truncating their analysis to fit apolitical tasks to the point that I can hardly put credible stock in any of the hype, positive or negative. TO be perfectly honest, this only crossed my path for fulfilling yet another reading women challenge, and this was (in)famous enough for me to have run across a copy at a library sale sooner rather than later. Two of the women writers who sing Stead's praises I personally can't stand to various degrees, and the third has already been so popularly reviled that if I ever get to her, at least I won't have to trudge through my usual cycle of overly giving the benefit of the doubt in lieu of the public narrative of praise. I finished this work, tedious as it was at times, and the best part of it was the fascist calling themselves a socialist-see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil white boy inevitably diving headfirst into Orientalism, as what this book does best is demonstrate the feeding chain of socially structured bigotry in all its grotesque machinations and pusillanimous glory. I'd view this book better if there weren't so much drama surrounding it, but alas. Most of the readers fueling such are the type to proclaim that racism is bad but spew on and on about "negativity" and "stereotyping" when confronted with the task of destabilizing harmful social structures, which is why buck tends to stop at all the Eurocentric 'typical family' nonsense in reviews. All in all, this odd duck of a tome could truly be something if the critical audience let it be such, but alas, the popular reception is on the verge of being as wish fulfillment for its proclaimers as are the sentiments of the book's titular character.
"Don't you think everyone has troubles?"
"A lot of people have a million dollars."
...[S]he had married a child whose only talent was an air of engaging helplessness by which he got the protection of certain goodhearted people—...in the deep past, by the same means, her own father.I'm annoyed at myself for taking this evaluation so personally, but after all, no one's paying me, and I am more authoritative than most when it comes to the political maneuvers and self-hating subversions one has to undergo since the point of cognizance until it's possible to escape such a self-immolating wasteland of exteriorized ego and interiorized negation. The book was brought to my attention in the most Twitter-drama of fashions, and after finishing it, and after finishing it, I'm mostly glad that I'm not likely to ever read it again. Stead's [b:Letty Fox: Her Luck|132508|Letty Fox Her Luck|Christina Stead|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320400476s/132508.jpg|127637] appeals, but that's probably just the siren call of the NYRB Classic edition's siren call at work again, so until another chronologically structured reading women challenge comes along, I"m content to let other's fervently disinter this woman writer. I didn't love this, but I didn't consider it a complete waste of time; I just wish mass reading audiences weren't so predictable in their reading evaluations, as it makes for untrustworthy advertisements for even the most contentious of literary reputations. All I can say is, if that aforementioned white boy author comes trumpeting across the headlines with another buried representative of a marginalized demographic, I sure hope the readers in the know refrain this time from completely losing their heads.
The Kings of Egypt were dark; all the world was dark until a very little while ago. Then the white man came from some little crack in the earth. He does not know about the times before he came. That is how we feel, sah; he is an accident.
She isn't my sister: to come there at the last moment without giving me any warning, after being silent all that time and in that state—why didn't she die? I thought she was sure to. What am I to do? Everyone must know. She wouldn't be quiet; I kept trying to stop her.
"I've never done any wrong," said Jo, stony with pride and passion; "I've never done wrong to a single human being: no one can say that."