jonathan franzen writes for emusic

This has been a long time in the making, but today we’re happy to feature a piece by National Book Award winner Jonathan Franzen on eMusic today. We approached Jonathan with a list of books we thought he might like to write about, but he suggested a different possibility to us: Christina Stead’s semi-obscure 1940 novel The Man Who Loved Children. I’ll confess that I knew nothing about this book before Jonathan suggested it, but reading his piece has certainly piqued my curiosity. To quote his essay, TMWLC tells the story of Sam Pollitt, “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.” The book sounds, by turns, grim and hilarious, winning enough that Franzen bestows upon it the honor of “best novel ever written about a nuclear family.” I’ll be downloading it today, based solely upon his recommendation.