review: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap is less of a tightly skewed exercise in punishing libertarians than James Ley in his ABR review would have us believe*, and more of a satanic version of Neighbours, borrowing where required from its far sexier and more richly cinematic relative Love My Way, and swapping most of the Anglos for their real northern (and increasingly eastern, western and southern) suburbs neighbours.

2010 Update: See also Venero Armanno's review in The Australian, which will give you a better idea of what you're in for than this review and discussion.

I can't recall an Australian novel that has so perfectly encompassed the Australian middle ground while at the same time veering so far away from presenting traditionally white-bread characters.

It's often said that the best politicians are those who can instinctively divine the zeitgeist of their country's centre. For the ones who can't, I would place The Slap as mandatory bedside table reading. It's a perfect social document of what Australia is today. More importantly, it's also one hell of a read.

For my part, I adored this book, though I'm not crazy about some of the Vaseline-lensed sex sprinkled throughout, which is borrowed quite happily from pulp romance, along with some rapid-fire dialogue that would sound awful even on television. That old porn writer Hanif Kureishi is less mechanical in this department, and with feeling (though I have not read Loaded, so don't know what else Tsiolkas does better either.)
I could not put The Slap down, walked around the house with it and had it finished pretty quickly given that the house was full of people, people talking to me, eating with me and generally doing stuff. It grew on me in much the same way Love My Way does if you are having the DVD-fest, though it is rather different in tone.

I thought Tsiolkas displayed masterly control of the multiple threads of narrative, probably doing a better job than anyone in the country. I was disappointed in his editors - Moorabbin with ONE B, and some neologisms that should not have got through (Mulitfarious, anyone? perhaps from the Latin root muliere, maybe something to do with women...?)

The interesting thing about this book was its effortless blend of well-observed local detail  ("I shot a man in Vermont, just to watch him die"), with the hyper-realism common to soap opera, but rarely well managed in novel form. Like the folks who wrote the end of Mullet, Tsiolkas knows this story has to be bigger than real life, soap without the bubbles: dirt, blood and a few broken teeth left in the bath when it's emptied. Yes, some silly things happen: but they do not have to be believable to make the book move and live and have its being, and his control of all threads is mesmerising - he never lets go. I don't think I've really explained what I mean there, but let it be.

I was moved to tears at least twice, firstly by the chapter on Connie's father, and on another chapter on the ageing Greek grandfather, Manoli, visiting his dying friend on a whim after a funeral.

We do need someone in this country writing anger, too, and again I beg to differ with Ley; instead of being weighted against the raffish failed bohemians Rosie and Gary, the anger is spread around this book like an infection (my evidence for this needs to be withheld though, for fear of spoiling the book for others.)
A lot of our novels are damn pretty, unfortunately. Funny, though, that this also happens elsewhere, so that someone like Richard Ford leaches anger slowly through his work and then gets really mad off the page. The stress of writing pretty can't be very good for one's emotional health, if Ford is anything to go by.

And the last chapter simply sings, resurrecting what I understand of Loaded (really must read that now), for a last run around the block, shall we say, before Christos has to really grow up. As Ley noted also, he writes magnificently about teenagers - there's a great little shoplift of cigarettes in the middle which simply shouted "Coles" to me. A very exciting book, much more to my tastes than Dead Europe, which was incredibly well written and conceived, but terrifying. Simply terrifying.

Whatever will he do next?

Update - November 2009

I am still receiving comments on this review, which is the most visited post on this blog. I would just like to say, given the number of negative comments I have received here about this book, that sometimes it is helpful to go to a writer's other books as well if you want some perspective on a work that you find disturbing or that makes you deeply critical.

The Slap is a departure from earlier concerns for this writer, which is why I am interested in it - after sex and drugs (Loaded), the sources of violence and racism in Europe as seen by an Australian traveller (Dead Europe) and the vagaries of suburbia (The Slap), I still wonder, what next for this talented writer? I'll certainly be looking for his next book, but this blog is not just here to give readers with a somewhat conventional notion of what a book should be 'about' a voice. I guess I'm a bit disappointed that fewer readers were able to engage with it on this level, and feel I have encouraged some venting of deep antagonisms towards the work without being able to direct readers to view it more constructively. That's probably my fault, and I apologise for that, but would encourage any of you who are unhappy with The Slap to make some time to go deeper into Tsiolkas' other work and try to understand two things: firstly, why it is his voice we're hearing about these issues, and not someone else's, and secondly, why some of us are annoyed by that. For example, why can't a gay man write about the possible roots of male violence for a general audience? why are people being upset by that?

I think The Slap is a remarkably successful, if occasionally unwieldy, exercise in not writing a television soapie as a novel, and I hope it leads a wave of incisive, adventurous suburban writing over the next few years - I would recommend Cate Kennedy's The World Beneath, quite a different book, but noted by reviewer Kerryn Goldsworthy as having a 'beady-eyed' perspective on contemporary society, to anyone who wants something to compare The Slap to. 

Comments on the post will be closed by the end of November (all posts on this blog are now set to have comments closed after a year), as this is the most read post on this blog and if discussion continues, I will have to read it again!! Only time will tell how this book and its many audiences evolve. If you would like to talk further about it after the end of this month, I would encourage you to consider starting a blog yourself...

*October 2011.  By the way, Ley's review, cited above, has aged very well, unlike this annotated hodge-podge.

Comments

[CW]

Thanks for this review. Was wondering whether or not to read The Slap, because I still shudder when I think of Dead Europe. That book actually made me shudder, the imagery was so vividly horrific.

[Janine]

Thanks for the review, G. It is an soap opera, albeit a well-written and plotted one. I'm halfway through reading it and am surprised by the numerous spelling errors - unfortunately, I find they interrupt the narrative flow (another one to miss the spell check was 'excpected').

[bahoutses]

christos , ive always enjoyed your writing, you've done it again with "the slap".. its not for evryone.. its for people who live it... one suggestion.. can it be printed in other languages.. and "greek" ofcourse.. i think my father would love it.. i know loaded was printed in greek.. keep up the great work.. nase kala xristo!!!

[CL]

I am surprised at the praise The Slap has been given, as to me it seems pretty ordinary. I have not finished it yet (but rather than finding it unputdownable, I am really labouring to push through it). Characterisation is poor; for example, what is the difference in personality between Hector and Harry? Harry is marginally coarser, but otherwise their voices are similar. Only in the chapter on the Greek parents has any character approached three dimensions. A shame, as some as sketched (Gary and Rosie; Sandi; Shamira) are potentially very interesting.

The types of editing errors mentioned above are distracting; I also find certain choices of when to use of names and pronouns jarring.

I guess we want a modern great Australian novel; and as this one is so, like, cool, with its multicultural, inner city food and lots of "edgy" (yawn) language, it's the one we want to hold up to the world. But it compares poorly to works like The Corrections; or (closer to home) Dirt Music. It's more like The Da Vinci Code of its time; that was "unputdownable", too, and appealed by making its readers feel erudite. Surely we can do far better (and of course we are, through other writers).

[genevieve]

Fair enough, CL. Who, then, is doing far better along with Mr. W?

It's interesting that you comment thus, as I have just been reading Antigone Kefala's journal where she records someone reading at a book event, so:

"The young man reading before me had a rough voice, a de rigueur voice developed in pubs, which they are giving us in literature too and think that this makes them Australian. A sort of inner brutality now that masks pretentiousness, an energy that never questions itself, a battering of language with no sense of its fragility, the beautiful energy, the dynamics that can be released when well used."

I'm not quite sure if I agree with her completely though, especially where Tsiolkas is concerned - I think he is well aware of all those things, even if he has not always paused to consider them in this book. Certainly I think we could do with more energy in some of our books, and that is addressed here to my liking, if not everything else.

And I'm not sure that I agree that these characters are indistinguishable, although the pace at which the story moves does mean some potential subtleties are sacrificed. There is a heightened moment between Connie and Aisha in the surgery that I thought was very badly skated over - I think the word 'adore' is used, sounded rather pulpy.

[Angela Rodd]

Re Genevieve's review at the top of this page: the word 'multifarious' is not a neologism. It means 'having great variety' or 'many and various'.

Christos Tsiolkas may know how to tell a story, but what a pity the story and the characters in "The Slap" are so cliched and one-dimensional. Despite the book's shoddy editing, its truly awful sex scenes (even the best writers struggle with those)and the predictability of the narrative, I kept reading because I was hoping against hope that something really interesting or surprising might happen at the end. It didn't. Tsiolkas lacks the ability to make this reader identify with or care much at all about any of the people whose lives he chronicles so verbosely and with such lack of ingenuity. And a final note to Genevieve: read Melbourne writer Michelle de Kreutser's "The Lost Dog" for an unusual story told with subtlety and originality.

[genevieve]

Thanks for your comment, Angela, and you're welcome to disagree with my review's positive attitude, of course. Can I remark that despite its obvious creakiness, The Slap has drawn more search results for reviews on this site than anything I've ever reviewed. So it's clearly being talked about, which is part and parcel of such adventures here.

Regarding vocabulary, of course I do appreciate that multifarious is the word that Allen and Unwin publishers were attempting to spell - I have the page number where they used that peculiar misspelling somewhere if it's been corrected - perhaps there's been a reprint already? and I'd be delighted if it has, as it simply shouldn't happen.

A couple of brief remarks on Michelle de Kretser's book are sprinkled through this weblog, though I have not reviewed it. I enjoyed it for the most part, though there are a few things about it I wasn't sure I was happy with, and I'm looking forward to reading The Hamilton Case at some point.
Thanks again for coming by :-)

[Meredith Jones]

I also couldn't put The Slap down. I was mesmerised by the horribleness of every character except for the two teenagers.

Genevieve, I do like your suggestion that a lot of our novels are too pretty and we need some people writing anger - perhaps also writing ugliness. And that thought is quite liberating!

[suz]

The Slap is certainly a page turner and Tsiolkas shows himself to be a pretty good storyteller but I'm very ambivalent about elements of the story - or the characters, really. Especially the female characters. What struck me was that the book is preoccupied with the male body and male sexuality - virtually every male character, even if he's just a bartender, is physicalised in some way and there's a sense that sex is possibly around every corner.

[Bruno Bouchet]

One of the many skillful things I admired in this book was the way it played with my own prejudices. While all the characters were horrid, somehow I found the women more objectionable. I know other readers that felt quite the opposite. Was that the author's prejudice or mine? I like that challenge.

I'd also like to comment on the various 'soap-opera' comments. The techniques which get snootily dismissed as 'soap-opera' in novels have been a mainstay of writing for hundreds of years - long before TV or even film was invented. What on earth is wrong with drawing a reader on, building suspense and dealing with issues that affect people in their lives? They are a legitimate and effective part of literature. Soaps took them up for a reason.

[Mark]

I haven't read the Slap, Gen, and wouldn't otherwise comment here but for your references to Loaded. I remember how Tsiolkasit was feted for it. I think it is a book of 'its time'. If that is a banal statement, in that all books are of their time, my point is I think that Loaded particularly is. I enjoyed it when I first read it, found it challenging, engrossing etc, but soon grew sick of how it came to signify what 'new' or 'dirty realist' writing was meant to be about, and what Melbourne 'really' was. And all that sex, drugs and disco.

Then again, if you like Kureishi's 'Sammy and Rosie Get Laid', or 'My Beautiful Launderette', etc, you may enjoy Loaded after all.

Then again, Kureishi didn't seem to rub it in my face.

Unlike how I feel about Kureishi's work, I'm over Loaded. Don't know yet if that means I'm over Tsiolkas too. Though with all the interest - positive and otherwise - in The Slap, I may get to it. Thanks for your review, I enjoyed getting further perspective on it.

[genevieve]

Mark, Suz, Meredith, Bruno - thanks for your comments all.
CT must be pleased with the fact that he has certainly got people talking, and connecting, either for better or worse, with his characters and action.

I think the sense of menace from male physicality is probably intentional at many points, Suz.
And Mark, I wonder if the book will date too.
We do seem to have a lot of pretty books, yes, Meredith! :-d and this is a change.

I think I was too busy anticipating potential disaster for the women to feel dislike for them, Bruno. I believe Tsiolkas spent a lot of time working on the female characters with two women writers who are his friends - ran a lot past them. So I'm sure disliking them is an option, depending on why - are they two-dimensional? self-centred? just too damn conflicted?

[rachtann]

Thank god for some serious reviews of this boring book. I was so disappointed in the predictability of the storyline. If I wasn't waiting for the sex, I was waiting for the drugs to come out. Having lived, worked and gone to school in these areas I found the characters extremely one dimensional, weak and self serving. The language may have reflected the 'edgey' modern social scene but where was the depth and style of descriptions found in other stories like Astley's or Winton's.

If anything The Slap is an insight into the mind of a modern Australian-Greek man and that insight shows that the racism so often raised in Melbourne papers is not necessarily driven by white Anglo-Saxons. Goodness if this is the state of Melbournians then we are a boring lot indeed.

I will however be looking out for Michelle de Kreutser's "The Lost Dog" to compare.

[Joanne]

I have just finished reading this book - I was curious because I have heard so much about it. I didn't like it at all. I found the soap opera style unappealing, and the characters, especially the women, limited and flat. The plot structure (centred around the slap) didn't really work for me, and the story seemed to lack pace and suspense.

The central theme seems to be male violence - a most important one - but the book did not offer any way forward (apart from female submission, that is). A bleak view of human nature and its possibilities, I think.

In view of the acclaim this book has received, I kept reading till the end in the hope of finding some redeeming feature, but could not.

[genevieve]

Joanne, Rachtann - thanks for your comments.

It does appear this book has polarised audiences, I did hear one audience member at Tsiolkas' recent appearance at the Melbourne Writers' Festival voicing a less subtle criticism - she had come to the festival, apparently, to let Tsiolkas know her book group found the book 'crude'- a funny reason to buy a ticket, I thought. But then perhaps my reason for buying a ticket was funny too. I think writers' festivals in general are pretty bloody funny all around.

Joanne, what did you think of Richie going to the BDO? I think that was Christos' way of saying, maybe there is hope...I hope your comment gets in before comments close here in a couple of weeks' time. If not, do get in touch.