Terrific piece by Jonathan Franzen on Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, at the NY Times Book Review.

From Randall Jarrell's introduction:

Louie is a potentiality still sure that what awaits it in the world is potentiality, not actuality. That she is escaping from some Pollitts to some more Pollitts, that she herself will end as an actuality among actualities, an accomplished fact, is an old or middle-aged truth or half-truth that Louie doesn't know.