Jonathan Franzen rave revives interest in neglected Australian writer
The Corrections author's endorsement gives huge fillip to sales of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children

Alison Flood, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 July 2010

A little-known 70-year-old novel by the Australian author Christina Stead has been given a new lease of life in the US thanks to Jonathan Franzen.
Franzen's rave review in the New York Times Book Review of Stead's The Man Who Loved Children has sent its US publisher, Picador, racing to reprint the novel. There are also plans to promote it at Barnes & Noble, Borders and a number of independent bookshops throughout the summer.

Sales for the book, which tells the story of the decline of an American family and which Franzen said "operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond", have hovered "in the hundreds" since Picador first began to publish it in 2001, spokesperson Frances Coady told US books magazine Publishers Weekly. But following the Franzen review, Picador has gone back to press for 4,000 copies and is hoping to reprint again shortly.

Franzen admitted in his article that The Man Who Loved Children was published 70 years ago to "lacklustre reviews and negligible sales", and that a 1965 reissue, despite including an introduction by the poet Randall Jarrell which praised it "roundly and minutely", also failed to install Stead in the Western canon.

"If an appeal as powerful as his couldn't turn the world on to the book, back in the day when our country still took literature halfway seriously, it seems highly unlikely that anybody else can now," he mourned. "Although The Man Who Loved Children is probably too difficult (difficult to stomach, difficult to allow into your heart) to gain a mass following, 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. 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."

Alison Flood's full piece at The Guardian.