'The Slap' - Christos Tsiolkas

If there is any real danger in doing an English Degree it is the ever present danger which I like to refer to as: 'The Danger of the Overly Helpful Middle-Class Lady'. I'm talking about the reasonably liberal (but with underlying conservative tendencies) great-aunt, mother-in-law or family friend that everyone has, that, upon discovering you 'do English' emits a high-pitched cooing noise immediately before squawking:

“You must have read [insert latest Booker prize winner/Guardian buzz-book here]!? It is simply a-MAH-zing”

After revealing that no, you haven't read it, you've spent the last month or so re-reading all the Tin-Tin's one is met with a terrible kind of stare, one that I take to mean: 'But I thought you said did English!' and an insistence to lend this particular tome to you. This is how I ended up reading The Slap, threatened with a terrible look, that became even more terrible upon the discovery that I am Australian and not carrying it around like a bible.

The novel is essentially not (as it seems to be being marketed) a novel about the repercussions and reactions to a child being slapped by a man who is not their father. This image serves more as a jumping off point for Christos Tsiolkas to explore the lives and relationships ('loves' seems the wrong term) of several middle class Australians. Perhaps the most interesting and engaging aspect of the novel is Tsiolkas' portrayal of racism and misogyny in many of the characters in the novel. The Slap deals with many second generation and third generation Australians and Tsiolkas uses much of the racist and misogynistic slang that is very present in Australia today. This aspect was particularly interesting to me as, growing up in Australia as a first generation citizen, I did in fact meet with these racist comments and terms myself and heard them used to refer to other first generation Australians of different decent. Although Tsiolkas' main concern is with people of Greek decent or 'wogs' to give the slang term, the attitudes that are found in The Slap towards people who are part of the more multicultural section of the Australian population are commendably portrayed, especially considering that this is an issue that does not seem to be greatly raised outside of the country. The fact that the novel was written when John Howard was prime minister of Australia is probably partly responsible for the level of anger in this portrayal as there were many great campaigns that ran along the lines of “Australia for Australians” during his term. Throughout The Slap Tsiolkas seems to be suggesting that these racist and old fashioned views must be blotted out for a multicultural society to exist. It is telling indeed that the parents of the obnoxious and badly behaved child that is slapped are stereotypical, blonde, beautiful white Australians.

Although these aspects of the novel were interesting they were unfortunately diminished by the fact that, to put it simply, much of The Slap was intensely unpleasant and boring to read. Whilst I enjoy novels that explore thoroughly unlikeable characters, The Slap has an excess of these sorts of people. In an interview in the Guardian Tsiolkas claimed that his novel deals with the real world in a way that the European English-language novel doesn't. It is hard however to see where he is coming from when the inner workings of a majority of his characters don't seem to react or deal with situations in particularly realistic ways. Several of the characters have affairs for which they feel little to no remorse, many take hardcore drugs with permission and almost encouragement from parental figures and everyone seems to be having copious amounts of sex. I am hardly a prude when it comes to sex in literature but Tsiolkas uses graphic descriptions of sex to the point where it stops being an effective literary device and merely becomes just another, vaguely unpleasant, porny sex scene.

Much of the The Slap comes across as overly ambitious. Some reviews comment that it is 'hard to summarise' but I would argue that this is merely excusing the fact that the novel does not seem to know what it wants to do apart from outrage and shock, and that the often more tender moments of life tend to be sullied by the overwhelming tendency toward showing how disgusting people truly are. In short it seems that The Slap ultimately wants to expose suburban Melbourne as being rife with sex, drugs and annoyingly overprotective hippy parenting, but gets weighed down by the fact that it hard to continue caring about what happens to such constantly unpleasant characters and the novel, in many aspects does not approach anything much like realism, besides it's portrayal of a racist element within the society.

Perhaps I should start carrying around The Slap like a bible. Then, when Overly Helpful Middle-Class Ladies ask me the inevitable,

“Why on earth did you leave Australia?”, I can simply hand them The Slap and say,

“Oh, this is why”. 

-Rebecca O'Donnell