This novel has the reputation of being under-appreciated. In its defence, Jonathan Franzen writes: “it’s certainly less difficult than other novels common to college syllabuses, and it’s the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for you.”
In my case, yes, this novel was really for me.
Franzen continues: “I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to it.” And indeed, I bless Francine Prose who put it on her list.
Randall Jarrell’s introduction (which should only be read, like most introductions, afterwards) alludes to Aristotle, who, according to Jarrell “speaks of the pleasure of recognition” which Jarrell applies to the novel, arguing that the reader can get the pleasure of recognizing their own childhood family life. I think that if this were true, Stead’s novel would not be under-appreciated. More realistically, there is a quote online from Hazel Rowley’s biography of the author, which describes the experience of reading Stead as a “chaotic sense of flux that makes reading Stead somehow unlike reading fiction, that makes reading her seem like plunging into the mess of life itself.’ This quality of unpolished rawness is something Stead’s readers either find immensely seductive or immensely irritating.” (Via)
What Randall Jarrell cannot label, writing as he is in 1965, Jonathan Franzen can, in an article published in the summer of 2010 (here, archived). Of Christina Stead’s character, Samuel Pollit, husband and father, Franzen writes:
“To a wild degree, Sam makes his children accessories of and to his narcissism. There isn’t a more hilarious narcissist in all of literature, and, in good narcissistic fashion, while Sam imagines himself a prophet of “world peace, world love, world understanding,” he remains happily blind to the squalor and misery of his circumstances.”
What makes it an “ecstatic pleasure” (in Jarrell’s words) to read, is the fact that Christina Stead had the genius to make narcissism palpable. In Franzen’s words: “When Louie tells her father that she’s never told anybody what her home life is like, the reason she gives is that “no one would believe me!” But the grown-up Stead found a way to make readers believe her. The fully mature writer created a faithful mirror of everything her father and Sam Pollit least wanted to see […]”
It is brilliant. And if ever anyone would want to know what it is to be the child of a narcissist, I would point them to this masterpiece.