Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

My vote goes to Christina Stead’s “The Man Who Loved Children.” It’s a great icy novel, a combat-dream inducing experience for the reader and a truly horrendous disquisition on what goes wrong with families. The reasons for its neglect are simple enough. It was written by a tough-minded lefty Aussie lassie and published on the verge of World War II. This constitutes bad luck in spades, but “The Man Who Loved Children” remains a spectacular and spectacularly adult book. One for the century.