AustLit

Jonathan Franzen makes a strong case for Christina Stead's novel The Man Who Loved Children, which he feels deserves a much wider readership than it has so far achieved.

Lead paragraph: 'There are any number of reasons you shouldn't read ''The Man Who Loved Children'' this summer. It's a novel, for one thing; and haven't we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn't we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about?' (New York Times Book Review 6 June 2010, p.11)