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the complete review - fiction

House of All Nations

by
Christina Stead

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : a formidable satire of the world of finance

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, though all are impressed by it.

  From the Reviews:

• "House of All Nations, set in 1931-1932, made you feel you were there, riding the downward spiral of economic collapse, buffeted by billowing war clouds each step of the way. (...) (A) novel that chews up and spits out the spirit of a whole decade (.....) The book may feel like an indictment, but it's not an indictment of particular characters -- it's an indictment of a society in economic anarchy that is heading inexorably toward war. Her characters, as they see it, are just making the best of a bad hand." - Michael Upchurch, The American Scholar
  
  
• "House of All Nations is a brilliant and exhilarating book, a superb performance of sustained wit, a crushing satire on the world of international finance. (...) House of All Nations is not constructed as an ordinary novel. It does not flow smoothly. (...) One of the most curious features of this novel is its complete lack humanity. In that perhaps is its most conspicuous defect. It is admirable in its surface polish. Outwardly men and women are photographically vivid: their speech is brittle and witty. But they have no flesh and blood. They are superbly manipulated sawdust puppets. (...) The scope of this book is almost too ambitious; but instead of failing in an exceptionally difficult undertaking, she has written a novel which will command universal admiration." - Edgar Holt, The Herald
  
  
• "In her latest and longest story she attempts a task which. one feels, might have been better done by a writer of no originality at all. (...) The brilliance of Miss Stead's comments and of many of her descriptions is undeniable; the fantastic nature of international finance is probably as undeniable. But the brilliance and the fantasy have combined to produce something which is neither in the realm of pure imagination nor in that of fact. There is not a completely credible character in the whole book (.....) This is a story into which a great deal of labour and a great deal of talent have gone; but it is hard to read, for it is hard to believe in." - Edwin Muir, The Listener
  
  
• "What House of All Nations chiefly proves is that the audience for Ouida and Gothic romance has not yet been completely absorbed by the. movies. Its members cast glances up and down the padded shelves of circulating libraries, on one of which this novel will, no doubt, have a long and profitable stay." - Louise Bogan, The Nation
  
  
• "It is almost defiantly (today-not when it was written) a real novel in the traditional form, whose characters have names, and personalities, and act at least as much as they talk and reflect. And it is utterly indifferent to technical innovation. This is not to say that the artist must eschew experiment; on the contrary. But Miss Stead has chosen not to experiment. (...) This is a long novel but never a wearying one. (...) (A)s in life, -there are no heroes, only men and women." - Charles Lam Markmann, The Nation
  
  
• "Christina Stead's House of All Nations is a virtuoso performance, a prodigious tour de force, an epic exercise of sheer writing will. Its design is spacious, its characterization is apt, and it is positively littered with epigrams. Yet it is one of the dullest novels which it has ever been my misfortune to read. The reason is obvious: it deals with a group of men and women who devote their lives to that dullest of all abstractions -- the abstraction of the money game. (...) Probably the story of Jules Bertillon's rise and fall could have been made interesting. But Miss Stead has chosen the wrong technique. Her book is filled with the gossip and the financial-circle clichés of Big Goings-On, but we never actually see the stupendous deals. And Miss Stead's human beings are always considerably less than human. (...) Balzac's lens was a wide one, and he ended by portraying the whole of bourgeois society. Miss Stead has merely given us the froth on the surface. The froth might have been enough in itself had it been treated farcically. But after 787 pages of it one feels choked with cheapness." - John Chamberlain, The New Republic
  
  
• "Christina Stead’s House of All Nations, first published in 1938 and a best seller then, is definitely a novel, and a remarkable one. But it is a novel about a disappearing place, curiously lightweight for all its 800-odd pages, a record of the chatter of Europe as it went under, as the pound sterling went off the gold standard, as the Japanese invaded Manchuria, as Hitler began his menacing, unbelievable ascent. It is a novel suspended in air, the earth pulled out from beneath it, caught by the writer the moment before the crash, both of the old genre and of its home and origin, became complete. (…) The book is too long, flounders a bit in its profusion somewhere just before the middle, but generally it is just this sense of a world rattling on without any kind of control or supervision that makes the novel work the way it does." - Michael Wood, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "The book has no apparent logical structure or system. It is 300,000 words, more or less, long; it could just as well have been 200,000 -- or 400,000. It has somewhere in the neighborhood of 125 characters, major and minor. It could just as well have had 100. Or 200. (...) The result is imposing, not only because of the scope and air of authority, but because of its crafty innocence. It is not, however, a book that many among even patient people will read to the end. That is Miss Stead's fault, or her publisher's. Less a study in human nature than a social panorama, the book could and should have made its point in half the space, with considerably fewer characters, internal analyses, protracted arguments, elaborate debates." - Ralph Thompson, The New York Times
  
  
• "Never submissive to the conventions of story-telling, she has put together a provocative jumble of brilliance and blatherskite the like of which has seldom appeared between boards. While it brings within the horizons of literature material never before mastered by a novelist, while it seethes and froths with a pyrotechnic imagination and spews forth characters and situations by the gross it is perverse in technique, contemptuous of intelligibility, and loaded down with a vast amount of documentary material and endless pedantic reproduction of the exact speech of inarticulate boors. (...) And yet, difficult and formless as the novel is, one cannot simply dismiss it as inchoate." - Harold Strauss, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "The book is a long one, only because the scope is large. I was held by it to the highest pitch of excitement. (...) The story is so well constructed, with such originality and force, that the main characters stand out clearly. There is nothing in the book except human beings and their activities, few descriptions of scenery or interior decorations, few doses of author's philosophy. The pages are filled with conversations and concise stage directions. The essence of Miss Stead's art is dialogue. (...) The emotional tension of the story rises and falls magnificently. (...) In this limited space it is impossible to do justice to Miss Stead's book. I only hope to convey that it is interesting and almost inexhaustible. Miss Stead possesses an immense vocabulary from which triteness only is missing, and she uses it with the utmost simplicity." - Elliot Paul, The Saturday Review
  
  
• "(A) dazzling and fascinating book. It may be doubted whether any other woman. in our time, has written a novel of contemporary affairs equal in brilliance to this one. (...) Looking for a word, we might say that it is a symphony, with privateering international finance as leitmotiv, and it is written wholly in scherzo movements. The wit is illimitable; the rapid grace of the writing is tireless; and the cynicism is superb enough to be called Olympian. (...) In its style of writing the book is quick, nervous, sparkling; mostly in a series of vignettes, and in dialogues short and long. (...) In her perception of financial intrigue, as well as in her naked studies of fraud, gluttony, perversion, avarice, and adultery, Miss Stead has eyes as ruthless as a studio light. It is a rare woman who can furnish scepticism and satire as unabashed as Voltaire's. This is an amazing book." - Adam McCay, The Sunday Sun and Guardian Magazine
  
  
• "Unlike most novelists of financial high life, Author Stead gives the complex details of shady transactions, banking manipulations, stock transfers, wheat deals, makes brilliant sense of gigantic currency speculations, of how the Bertillons make millions in bear operations on Kreuger stocks. Combined with her Hogarthian humor, brilliant vocabulary, high-keyed imagination, the result is one of the most savage satires on "the principle of money" since Balzac." - Time
  
  
• "This is a long, unfathomably static but often exhilarating novel about money. There are 104 chapters, at least as many characters, and dialogue that runs on and on like ticker tape. (...) She observed the motley incarnations of greed who inhabited the place, and obviously developed a grudging fascination with the charms of avarice. But she has set it all in motion with more gusto than discrimination." - Martha Duffy, Time

  Quotes:

• "In House of All Nations (1938) (...) the puppy-fat is already beginning to fall away from the bare bones of Stead’s mature style, and of her mature purpose, for this is a novel straightforwardly about the root of all evil: that is, banking. However, the complications of its plotting recall the Jacobean drama at its most involuted, so that it is quite difficult to tell exactly what is going on. In fact, the elaborately fugal plotting of House of All Nations is beginning to dissolve of its own accord, just because too much is going on, into the arbitrary flux of event that characterises Stead’s later novels. And she is beginning to write, not like a craftsman, but like an honest worker." - Angela Carter, London Review of Books (16/9/1982)
  
  
• "The House of All Nations is an excellent, interesting novel, large in scale, intelligent, and splendidly detailed." - Elizabeth Hardwick, The New Republic (1/8/1955)

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       In the early 1930s Paris when this novel is set it was Le Chabanais, a grand, opulent house of pleasure that styled itself a 'House of All Nations' (e.g.). The institution at the heart of Christina Stead's House of All Nations is a bank, but with her title she certainly meant to suggest parallels between this Banque Bertillon frères, with its largely upper-class and international clientele and the kinds of games they play, and the (in)famous luxury-bordello. (There's even a touch of actual overlap, including when one of the frères-Bertillon observes about one of their bank-men: "I don't see why we can't have a man who knows the prices at the House of All Nations".)
       House of All Nations comes with an epigraph (from Diderot) but also an opening page of quotes headed 'Credo' -- sixteen short quotes attributed to characters then introduced in the novel, clever remarks that also appear, in similar form, in the story proper in this epigram-littered novel. Several are attributed to the novel's central character, Jules Bertillon, the youngest of five brothers and the man who runs Banque Bertillon frères; among these is:

It's easy to make money. You put up the sign BANK and someone walks in and hands you his money. The façade is everything.

     "It's too nice. Where's the bill department ? Where's the loan department ? Where's the business done ? I don't see any banking."
     "It's a rich man's club: a gambling, deposit, and tax-evasion bank, don't you see ? It's the rich man's section of a big bank taken out, polished, and set rolling on its own wheels. Very good idea. Jules always had such chic ideas."

Jules, not out of cynicism, but out of the clarity of his nature, believed nothing that was told him, sought the person's interest behind each sentence, lied perpetually for the pleasure of tricking even the credulous, tried to recast every situation, for the pleasure of changing it; he cared not so much for money as for moneymaking, and, when he had got the hang of moneymaking, not so much the making of money as the endless field for speculation and fantasy it yielded him. He hated to think, he liked to depend entirely "on inspiration"

He knew, really, nothing, and nothing of the world he lived in, worked in, made money in: monstrously ignorant, he succeeded because he had recognized at once that in the financial world there are no dignities which cannot be questioned or facts which are not given out for someone's interest.

That's the only way profit is going to be made from now on. The history of everything is down from now on. The only investment now is in a crash. I saw that in 1929. Everyone else was wringing their hands. I was short a few stocks in the American market. I made a bit of petty cash: but the next day I figured it all out to myself. I said to myself: I won't weep. I won't cry. I've got the hang of this -- first the Russians started to smash the works and then the Americans had to. That's it ! The history of the world is down !

You're one of the few men in the world who had the courage to say, ‘This is an age of going-down and I'm betting on disaster,’ and who actually went and pyramided on disaster and who has won ! Why give up ? You are born for this age ! You are brilliant, Jules. You can be another Rothschild.

The trouble is that you have a best seller, Jules, in your bank. The cover and the title alone sell the book. But when they open it, there's nothing inside. First you're a bear on the market, then you become too clever and become a bear on the whole world; next you're a bear on yourself, too. Where are you going, Jules ? Don't speculate, Jules.

Who told you I wanted to build a bank ? I don't ! I want to play around and go up in smoke perhaps ! Why not! It's my bank, it's my fun. You people are crazy wanting me to make something !

(Y)ou don't make money by knowing anything. You make money by having a game and employing smart dumbbells to work at it for you.

Only, he's not a partnership. He's one man. A sort of Quixote with a couple of Sancho Panzas and a donkey and it doesn't work. No Sancho Panza ever yet stopped a Quixote from getting his nose broken by a windmill

- M.A.Orthofer, 13 July 2022

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Links:

• Melbourne University Publishing publicity page
• Open Road Media publicity page

• The Herald
• The Saturday Review
• The Sunday Sun and Guardian Magazine
• Leigh Swinbourne
• Time

• Christina Stead at the Australian Dictionary of Biography
• Christina Stead at books and writers

• William Gaddis' J R
• See Index of Australian literature
• See Index of Books Written Between 1900 and 1945

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About the Author:

       Australian author Christina Stead lived 1902 to 1983.

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© 2022 the complete review

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