Book review: The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

A group of friends, relatives and colleagues gather in a prosperous suburban home in Melbourne for a Saturday evening barbecue. Aisha, the daughter of an English mother and Indian father, and Hector, the son of Greek migrants, serve up a multicultural feast with the help of Hector's parents, Manolis and Koula. But the revelling comes to an abrupt end when a man slaps someone else's misbehaving child. The consequences of this event are huge and far reaching, splitting bonds and pitting friends and family members against each other.

Some of my responses to this book are inevitably personal. Like Tsiolkas I'm a Generation X-er, but I'm also a refugee from Melbourne's inner city, which many of my generation discovered when they went to Melbourne Uni or RMIT. This novel maps Melbourne suburbs, particularly the inner north, with a loving detail that one might usually ascribe to the city's crime writers.

With the same wide vista it maps the joys and ills of Generation X and just as significantly its children, whether they're in nappies or the throes of adolescence. It's rooted in place but in no way provincial. It's distinctly Melburnian in its adumbration of the multicultural nature of the city, where Lebanese, Jewish, Indian and Greek befriend each other, fall in love and negotiate each other's cultural legacies. In that sense Tsiolkas is a much more articulate voice for Generation X than is, say, Elliot Perlman, writer of the problematic Three Dollars.

Without trying to ghettoise Tsiolkas, his voice as the son of Greek migrants is a distinctive one. His first novel, Loaded, was characterised as 'grunge lit', while its anti-hero, Ali, was a member of an alienated generation caught between two cultures, both of which Ali held in contempt. The novel thus positioned itself against the mainstream.

But through the success of the novel and in his subsequent writing, including The Slap, Tsiolkas has helped to change the nature of mainstream Australian literature, showing how the migrant voice is part of the mainstream, and in doing so altering and problematising the meaning of 'mainstream' in Australian lit. In this way he has had an impact that could in some respects be compared to that of Garner's Monkey Grip, which shone a spotlight on inner-city Melbourne bohemians of the 1970s, changing the literary landscape forever.

There is an energy behind all of Tsiolkas's writing, a creative propulsion that makes his refusal to write beautiful sentences a virtue. He will never write sentences like Garner, as smooth as a worn pebble, but he doesn't want to. Tsiolkas's writing style is raw, rough around the edges, sometimes journalistic. He seeks to coolly describe the zeitgeist rather than to judge it:

Sandi was standing at the edge of the pool, her skin tanned a rich honey. She too was wearing a bikini, but whereas the girls' swimsuits had seemed sluttish and vulgar, his wife seemed to him to be as exquisite as the elegant European models on the covers of the magazines she read ... He looked up at her and regretted fantasising over the cheap floozies on the beach.

Tsiolkas is alone among our writers in the extent of his ease with the body and its functions, its often unwelcome desires and betrayals. His characters live through their bodies and are never abstract. His microscopic knowledge of popular music and the drug and communication habits of young people, and his matter-of-fact descriptions of sexuality earth the novel, but the uncompromising picture of modern life, particularly our collective addiction to the screen, is sometimes bleak. Nevertheless there are frequent joyous experiences, revelations and breakthroughs.

I liked Tsiolkas's previous novel, Dead Europe, but felt claustrophobic being stuck in the head of the novel's main character, who was intense to say the least. The structure of The Slap -- innovative, simple and effective -- avoids this danger. Rather than trying to handle so many points of view at once Tsiolkas has divided the novel into eight sections, each told by an omniscient narrator but from the viewpoint of one of the individuals in the drama. This works well because the story moves on through the characters, that is, the same story isn't repeated endlessly and seen from different points of view. The only issue for me is that some interesting characters 'miss out' so we don't feel we know them as well.

The attempt to show so many facets of modern life is a real development for Tsiolkas as he refuses to be sidelined as a merely 'ethnic', gay or even political writer. His characters encompass a host of cultural backgrounds, ages, political standpoints and sexualities. He has said that he enjoyed the process of using his imagination to tell the story and here he revels in seeing the world through many eyes.

There's one thing that bothered me about the novel and my reaction to it is perhaps a function of Tsiolkas's refusal to judge his characters. The women in this novel who are mothers -- Aisha, Rosie and Sandi -- all seem to have a masochistic streak. And significantly, to various extents they are the most angry about the slap. I think Tsiolkas is attempting here to show us the lives of average women as they are lived rather than a feminist fantasy, but in doing so he risks essentialising some aspects of femininity such as the maternal urge and its social and political consequences.

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