Mom and Dad are both monsters - The Man Who Loved Children

I saw that the Times Book Review would run an essay by Jonathan Franzen on Christian Stead's "The Man Who Loved Children," which prompted me not to read the article in advance (the Times posted it Friday) but to pulls the ancient pb edition off my shelves and start it - something I've been meaning to do for 30+ years. When I first began teaching, one of my colleagues at UMass had just finished her Harvard dissertation on Stead - that was the first I'd heard of her. Man who Loved has been always listed as a feminist classic, went through a small vogue (my friend on the vanguard), then has kind of faded. My pb edition is archaic and in nearly unreadable type! Anyway, without reading the Franzen this morning I did see the headline and we came to the same comparison - this is a Strindberg family, man and woman at war to the death. I think the feminist interpretation has always cast Sam Pollit, father, the man of the title, as the monster - my pb edition blurbs him as "the complete egomaniac" or something like that - which is totally true, even more so today perhaps as we're more aware of proper boundaries and his sexually tinged jostling with his children, especially his daughters, is extremely creepy. But Henrietta (Hennie) is horrible, too - equally or more so - a selfish monster who is poisonously cruel to her children and esp her stepdaughter, Looie. It would be absurd to blame her behavior on her unfaithful husband - she bears responsibility for her actions, especially in relation to her children. The egomaniacal, heroic dad has become something of a trope, see Jennifer McPhee's excellent Bright Angel Time, e.g., but there's no viewpoint from which we can love and admire either parent, at least in the first 70 pp or so - they're both horrible, and the wonder is that the children seem unscathed, even delightful.