Customer Reviews

The Slap

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(32)

 

 

This book has occasioned a lot of controversy with many people thinking that it is misogynistic. It's overly simplistic to see this story as full of misogyny, but even if the charge held, novelists are under no obligation to be politically correct.

This is in many ways an old fashioned novel. It has a beginning, middle and an end.
Christos Tsiolkas is giving us his version of social reality and satirizing the concerns of the middle class of the 21st century. Maybe there's more cursing and sex than readers of literary novels like, but it's not gratuitous cursing and sex. It does contribute to the picture he paints of his characters. The men and women are ambivalent about one another. The characters are not always easy to like, but Mr. Tsoilkas helps us understand them.

I found Rosie, the indulgent mother of the 4 year child that is slapped, only too believable. Her child menaces an older child with a baseball bat and later in the novel spits on an elderly man out of pure malice and--that most insidious of 21st century diseases--entitlement Yet Rosie oblivious to her son's faults, is walking around with dirty hair explaining to a friend that she and her husband are trying to teach him about water conservation. But I felt sorry for her as well. She is isolated from her narcissistic mother and overly protective of her difficult husband and her young son, but enraged when her friends seem to favor family loyalties over loyalty to her.

One of the more sympathetic characters in the book is Manoli the elderly uncle of he man who delivers the slap. Manoli struggles to understand why his daughter-in-law would side with Rosie, rather than with her family. Manoli has seen great upheaval and spends one afternoon burying an old friend The scene at the house follow the funeral was one of my favorites It was filled with such warmth and regret. While talking to the widow, he hears that other friends have been largely reclusive since their son was shot and killed by drug dealers
After he visits this family and sees an elderly friend wasting away from lung cancer he is saddened that his own children's lives seem to be focused on petty concerns and that they have no conception of what is important in life.

Mr. Tsiolkas also deals with issues of multiculturalism, class, how people make their marriages work and how they raise their children The kids from broken homes--Richie, a young gay man reared only by his mother and Connie, Richie's best friend, who lives with her single aunt are the most appealing of the children.

Henry James urged the novelist to `try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'
Mr. Tsiolkas is no Henry James. The Master would never write such graphic sex scenes or use such profanity, but very little seems to be lost on him and the book is dense enough to be worth re-reading.

This novel has aroused some real emotion and anyone whose writing can get people talking--no matter how bitterly--is not to be dismissed.

There are different levels of knowing a character in a story. There's the upper level...where you know what actions a character takes - what happens to a character. There's the next level, where you know many of the character's thoughts and start to know how s/he is feeling, getting some sense of what the person might do next. And then there is the level that is reached in "The Slap". The reader knows what the characters do, how they feel...and what they really think. By that I mean even those nasty, fleeting thoughts that one can't control and that one rarely acts on...but that have settled down in the murky depths of our animal souls.

I am glad I read this book - it was interesting how my opinions changed of the eight characters the reader is given full access to as I experienced more of their thoughts and actions. In all cases but two, I went from liking them or only mildly disliking them to thinking they were truly awful people. Well drawn and realistic people, which almost made me like them even less.

The pivot point of the book is right there in the title - the slap that happens at a barbeque. Friends and family gather for what promises to be a pleasant evening, too much food but only the usual everyday human dramas...when everything changes. As the cover says, "a man slaps a child who is not his own..."

Each character has his or her own ties to the man and to the child, has their own opinion of the right and wrong of what happened. While not all of their lives are as deeply affected by the act and by the events that follow - they are all touched by this unexpected and shocking event.

The reader enters every crevice of the minds of these eight characters, the man who slapped the child, the child's mother, the couple at whose home the incident happened and that man's father and the woman's friend and the two young adults that attended the barbeque. We learn about their lives and their pasts, how they came to be a part of this story, and how they are connected to the other characters.

Manolis, an older man, considers what he would do if his child had been the one involved. "I'd be furious. But if Sava was going to hit his child I'd understand. I'd take an apology and that would be it. Finished. Maybe I'd punch him a few times. We'd deal with it like men, not like animals..."

Aisha and Hector find themselves examining their marriage as they deal with the fact that his cousin slapped her friend's child at their home. Each has different loyalties, different responses to the event. "There was a humming in her ear that was, she was sure of it, the sound of the universe spinning around and around, ready to fling both of them off into an orbit, one in which they either surrendered finally to each other or were forever flung apart. They both discussed their longing for freedom, for a life without a spouse, a life not dictated to by the whims, joys, petty angers and obsessions of another."

I was very surprised about how my feelings about the characters changed the further I read. Those I might be most likely to identify with, given my life, turned out to be some one the ones I disliked the most. And the choices of many of the characters, whether they are about their reactions to the slap, their sexual choices, their drug use...shocked me.

This was such an interesting character study, to, of daily middle class life. True, it is set in Australia, and not the U.S. where I live, but there are far more similarities than differences.

What I took from this was more about the middle-class, suburban life of the twenty-first century. Behind the mask of the McMansions and manicured lawns, lies something uglier, something hopeless, something deeper than the latest purchases and who's driving the newest car. Something that comes to light with a disquieting smack.

Oh, how gratified we Australians are, and particularly Melburnians, to have a book set in a place we recognise. "I might have had a drink in that bar opposite Federation Square." "Yes, I've sat on a restaurant balcony in St Kilda looking at the Bay." And then the Australian-based awards flow like honey. As they have for The Slap.

You are not likely to read anything that will engage your passions, or even intellectual interest, on the subject of slapping as a method of child discipline. You probably already have your views, and this book won't change them. But it's a handy enough device for kicking off a story that keeps rolling along well enough, with the changing point of view through eight disparate characters keeping you reasonably engaged.

It's basically a book about ordinary enough people doing ordinary enough things. Most of it wouldn't be out of place as a screenplay for a Neighbours episode. (For those who don't know, Neighbours is a long-running Australian TV soap opera watched by a few Australian teenagers and many Brits of all ages.)

The one aspect that I found repellent was the constant emphasis on race. No characters are introduced without immediate mention of their race, and even second and third generation immigrants appear not to feel at home in Australia or even seem to want to do so. It's an ugly picture of a society of splintered tribes, which I don't think reflects current Australian reality and I hope it never does.

Like Tsiolkas' other works, this one features plenty of raw sex scenes, though most of the ones in this novel are heterosexual. Don't read it if you don't like these; if you don't mind, then go ahead. As other reviewers have said, the sex scenes are written from a masculine and phallocentric perspective. And why not, there's no reason why all sex scenes have to be in Mills and Boon style

Hector and Aisha are a successful fortysomething married couple with two children living in suburban Melbourne, who are hosting a weekend barbecue for friends, colleagues and family. They are typical, yet unique; Hector is a successful manager born to Greek immigrants to Australia, and Aisha is a veterinarian of Indian descent . Both are stunningly attractive, and are quite proud and aware of their physical appearance. On the surface, Hector and Aisha appear to be a model and staid middle class couple.

Friends and family come over; all are middle class, and represent the diversity of cultures that populate this international city. The adults talk amiably and the kids play nicely -- at first. The men and women begin to bicker, and so do the kids. One of the boys, a three year old who is still breast fed by his dippy Aussie mother and allowed to express himself without fear of punishment, begins to fight with the other kids and destroy the toys that they are playing with. His behavior spirals out of control, and one of the adults, who is not related to him, slaps him in a pique of anger. The boy isn't seriously hurt, but his parents are incensed, and threaten to sue the "assailant". The party abruptly ends, as the inebriated adults bicker and take sides with each other.

The novel explores the reactions of several of the adults and one teenager who attended the party to the slap. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of one of the characters, and we learn about their dissatisfied lives, motivations, and secret desires. Each is selfish, unfaithful and untrustworthy, terribly flawed and dislikable, but 'human, all too human'.

It is all too easy for the reader to reject and dismiss these characters, with their foul language, use of drugs and alcohol, and the abysmal way in which they raise their children. We're not like that, and we would never associate with people like this. However, these are real people, and their desires are not that much different from the rest of us, except that they act on them whereas we might -- might -- restrain ourselves. Like us, they bemoan the selfishness and boorish behavior of the current generation of children and teenagers, while ignoring the reality that our own self-absorbed attitudes are the main cause of this.

"The Slap" is an unblinking look into the lives of real people, which will make the average reader squirm with discomfort and disbelief. However, Tsiolkas effectively removes the veneer of middle class life, and his indictment of the failings of our consumer driven, me first Western societies is a worthwhile contribution that should be widely read and heeded.

In their brilliantly witty book 'How Not To Write A Novel', Mittelmark and Newman warn against making any character whom the reader might identify with do anything gross within the first three chapters:

'It's not that the reading public is uptight or moralistic; they know everyone masturbates, has unworthy thoughts about the buttocks of colleagues, etc. The reader also knows everyone poos. But if the first thing a character does is poo in front of the reader, the reader will think of him as the Pooing Character forevermore.'
[p. 68]

Christos Tsiolkas's novel 'The Slap' opens with a description of the main character lying in bed flatulating. (One of Lisa Jewell's chick-lit novels - whose title doesn't come to mind - does the same.) It is a foretaste of what is to come.

'The Slap' recounts the aftermath of an event which takes place at a suburban barbecue in Melbourne: a man slaps someone else's child. The story is told from the point of view of eight people who were at the barbecue, though not in first person for any of them. Thus the author relieved himself of the task of developing 'voice' for multiple characters, a challenge which some rube interviewer on SlowTV actually credited him with rising to.

My favourite prose blunder in the book occurs when one of the characters writes a letter lamenting that 'I will break into long and terrible tears' [p. 218]. In the same letter the character recalls 'how we used to laugh at old Mrs Radic next door when she would soliloquise on the pain of exile.' Tsiolkas presumably couldn't think of the word 'rhapsodise': for if Mrs. Radic were really uttering a soliloquy, that meant that nobody was there to hear it, and therefore nobody was there to laugh at it. Wrong choice of fancy word.

It gets worse. Here are a few contenders for the Delete Key Awards:

'I'm not going to have this conversation, thought Anouk. Let us not have this f@#*ing conversation again.' [p. 74]

'She must pretend it did not hurt. If it hurt, she had to pretend it didn't.' [p. 208]

'She didn't want to think about Hector tonight. She wasn't going to think about Hector tonight.' [p. 219]

But the truth be told, this book doesn't even pass the grammar-and-syntax test. Examples:

'What would have her mother chosen?' [p. 144]

'Who knows what secret places her vices took her!' [p. 215]

'What are you up tonight?' [p. 230]

(One is thus left wondering what this book's editor was paid to do.)

The writing in 'The Slap' is appallingly boorish, and when it's not it's merely lazy. The thoughtless, hurried prose reads like something frantically typed beneath the shadow of a looming publisher's deadline: anything will do. One amusing example of this occurs on page 229 when one of the characters sits down at a table. With most writers, this would not occasion a paragraph-long description of the table itself, but Tsiolkas doesn't seem to know when to stop cramming stuffing into the turkey.

Then there is the matter of simple nihilism. Melbourne is one of the most liveable and genteel cities in the world. You would never know it to read Tsiolkas's depiction of its middle class. Everyone herein is either drug-abusing, cheating on their wives, beating on their wives, luridly fantasising about rough sex with adolescents [p. 83], demanding rough sex from their husbands [p. 112], relaxing in front of the TV after aborting their unborns [p. 81], or just hating their children.

All the characters, as ventriloquised by the author, are uniformly foul-mouthed. Somehow this extends even into their unspoken thoughts. The following are some delightful examples of not even dialogue, but inner monologue. (I've had to euphemize the extracts, but still those of you afflicted with good taste may wish to look away.)

~~~~~~~~~ Anouk: ~~~~~~~~~

'The soap was filled with wholesome, bosom blondes and that made Anouk feel decadent and amoral, made her want to f@#* them up.' [p. 54]

'F@#*ing stupid regulations, f@#*ing nanny-state ideology, f@#*ing puritanical death-fearing Protestantism. F@#*!' [p. 61]

~~~~~~~~~ Harry: ~~~~~~~~~

'And that c#nt wants to f@#* it all up. He couldn't decide who [sic] he hated more: the hysterical wife who had hissed at him with unconcealed contempt, the drunk, weak f@gg#t of a husband, or the whiny little pr*#k he had slapped. He wished the three of them were dead. F@#* the lawyer. If he had real b@lls ...' [p. 87]

'... to lose it and grab his wife and shake the stupid b#tch over and over till he could hear the teeth rattle in her head, till he could see her eyes bulge, till he had her crying for forgiveness on her f@#*ing knees. On. Her. F@#*ing. Knees.' [p. 125]

~~~~~~~~~ Connie: ~~~~~~~~~

'She hated herself. She was the worst b#tch in the world. She f@#*ing hated herself.' [p. 160]

'He had not let himself f@#* her. She had tried to bl@w him once, in the car, but he had not let her. She hated him for that, she f@#*ing hated him for that.' [p. 165]

'I f@#*ing hated Joy Division. I f@#*ing hated The Clash. I f@#*ing loathed Techo.' [p. 218]

(Connie's inner monologues are interesting because they instantiate one of Tsiolkas's worst habits. If a sentence looks like it has had no impact, he simply re-types it with a swear-word and moves on.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A schoolteacher in my hometown used to say that people swear from lack of vocabulary: bad writers are no different. Far from finding a different 'voice' for each of his characters, Tsiolkas seems merely to have hosed them all down with the squalor of his own mind. In terms of lifestyle and even speech, they stand before the reader dripping helplessly with the sewage their creator poured over them, and all for want of talent and imagination. It's one thing to pull back the veil of Western affluence to reveal that in *some* places there is repulsiveness beneath. But Tsiolkas has taken the clumsy step of depicting *nothing but* repulsiveness. Most middle-class families in Australia are drug-free, relatively content, and, as far as we can tell, helmed by faithful partners. In Tsiolkas's lazy mind, none are.

After about 100 pages it becomes obvious that the book is not going to take a turn for the literary. There will be no miracle recovery from prose this bad, and soon one begins to hurry along, flicking the pages briskly, looking for the intermittent patches of quality. Soon, hope fades of finding even this, and one is left scrounging for mere fragments of readability. I finally took my head out of this dustbin of a novel around page 250: the stench had become overpowering.

The verdict? When novels like this win awards like the Commonwealth Prize we are in real trouble. This book doesn't deserve accolades: it deserves a slap.

Short version: interesting concept, but don't bother unless you like dark, harsh, unloveable characters and can put up with excessively coarse language and sex scenes.



Christos Tsiolkas has won a couple of awards for this book, which centres around an Australian suburban BBQ at which an adult slaps someone else's child. When I first heard about this, I loved the idea, but the way Tsiolkas put it together left a lot to be desired for me.

¡Issues
Let's see... teenage sexuality, Muslim conversion, racism, child rearing, breastfeeding, assault and child abuse, adultery, drug taking, alcoholism, selling out to popular culture, family, role of parents, multiculturalism, John Howard's policies, Aboriginality...

It's as if Tsolkias couldn't just pick one issue to deal with. He packed this book full of all Australia's most wanted. It's a book club dream, and there will be plenty to talk about, but it's too much for me.

In places it feels as if Tsolkias is writing about issues, rather than writing a story. I don't mind a novel that delves into themes and problems, but when they overcome the story, I'd prefer it to be an essay or sermon.

¡Sex and drugs
When does a book get pornographic? There were at least 8 characters, and each of them had extremely well-described sex at least once. I'm not against a bit of nookie when it adds to the story, but this was over the top. It was definitely written from a man's point of view too - very phallus-centric.

And drugs. Frankly, I'm not sure that a father of two would be scoring speed at his family BBQ, and then getting through the afternoon without even his wife noticing that he was high. Every character except the Greek migrant grandfather and the Australian breastfeeding mother takes drugs. The young 18 year old heading off to a party after his end of school exams gets ruffled on the head by his mother when she realises he will be popping some pills. "You're growing up," she says. Come on! Are drugs that plentiful and easy to get that two businessmen, two high school students, a veterinarian, an Aussie blue collar painter and a screen writer can just take whatever they want? Maybe it's just Melbourne

¡Language
A well-placed expletive can have a tremendous effect in a story line or for a character, but by the time you've read f&*%ing c%^$ c%$#&%$ in every second sentence, it becomes boring. Just to illustrate this paragraph, I turned at random to pages 316 and 317 in my copy of the book and counted up 6 unnecessary swear words and coarse language.

I grew up with the understanding that people swore because they didn't have a very good grasp of language. The trouble is, Tsolkias does have a good grasp of language. He is a good writer. Obviously his characters are lesser people than he is.

¡Characters
The simple fact of the matter was that by the end I just didn't care about his characters. There was plenty that was ugly, dark and degenerate about each of them. There was very little that was noble, good, generous or honest. Every relationship had major flaws and was built on a flimsy foundation.

¡Summary
There was hardly anything in this book that brought hope or joy. If this is Australia, and these are Australians today, then I am sorry for us. It makes me more aware that there must be something more. God's grace seems even more necessary and beautiful when I read this book.

I did purchase this book, but not through Amazon. I was hooked by the tag line for this book. I thought, being a mother, the subject matter might be of interest to me, and the book had received several accolades. The book was nothing like I expected, and not in a good way. I enjoyed components of the book, but the only reason it didn't get turfed on the shelf or into the recycle bin after the first few chapters is because I wanted to see these nasty characters get what they deserved. I kept reading because I just had to see justice prevail. I was dissatisfied in that respect also. I was so annoyed by this book that you might wonder why I gave it 3 out of a potential 5 stars. The writing was good, save the over-use of profanities, which reminded me of a comedian's use of profanity to make up for a lack of content (compare Eddie Murphy - e.g in his movie Raw - to Bill Cosby, for example - one feels the need to swear to be funny, and the other doesn't). Tsiolkas was capable of making me vehemently detest some of his characters, and that does require skill. As I was reading this book, I must have complained at least every chapter about how much I loathed this book, yet I continued reading. Clearly I loathed the characters, and wasn't fond of aspects of Tsiolkas style, but it was a good enough book to warrant a middling rating. It's certainly not a book I'd read again, but it's possible that in some remote region of my subconscious, I'm somehow better for having read it.

and it was a difficult book to actually read.

Another reviewer, who definitely didn't like the book, used this description .."Let's see... teenage sexuality, Muslim conversion, racism, child rearing, breastfeeding, assault and child abuse, adultery, drug taking, alcoholism, selling out to popular culture, family, role of parents, multiculturalism, John Howard's policies, Aboriginality... " to enumerate "The Slap's" plot points. And she was dead-on right. Author Christos Tsiolkas takes on almost every issue in today's society in Australia - the good along with the bad. Does he do a good job at it? I think he does, but, boy, I can sure see why other readers didn't think so.

"The Slap" is told in eight different voices; those of eight people who had been guests at a Melbourne picnic where a man slapped a naughty child who he thought threatened his own child. Lives were changed because of this slap, some minor, others major. The center of the book, does someone have the right to discipline another person's child? In this case, the three year old child, "Hugo", was receiving no parental guidance. He was allowed to run wild and had upset many guests at the party. This child was just cruisin' for a bruisin'!

The book has overt sexual scenes and obscene language. I can see how that might offend some readers. But, I didn't think the sex and language was used in a gratuitous way. It seemed intrinsic to the story. Tsiolkas writes very well and movingly about relationships. Relationships of all sorts; between parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. Even between bosses and employees. No main character gets off easy in Tsiolkas's telling. All have faults - some more grievous than others - and most are not likable. But, do characters in a book need to be likable? No, but they have to be interesting. The reader has to be interested enough in them to continue on to the end of the story. And these characters ARE interesting.

Tsiolkas has written a large, unwieldy book, full of life. I thought it was a very good book, but I can respect others who were offended or just bored by it.

I was a bit surprised how poorly this book has been rated by Amazon reviewers. So much so that I looked for benchmarks. One benchmark was Jonathan Franzen`s "Freedom", which earned one of the Top 10 best books of 2010 from the New York Times. "The Slap" and "Freedom have in common a) critical acclaim and b) a storyline around the realities and conflicts of "life in suburbia". To my surprise, "Freedom`s" ratings are perhaps slightly worse than "The Slaps`s": the number of 1 ratings is greater than that of 5 ratings and exceed a quarter of all ratings received.

I also looked to see how "The Slap" was rated in Amazon UK. I thought the relatively poor ratings may be due to lack of cultural identification by Amazon's American readers. But the ratings at Amazon UK were at least as bad as on Amazon US.

My conclusion from the above is that readers who are interested in high quality, serious literature about "life in suburbia" should ignore the low ratings on Amazon, give more importance to what the critics say, and give "The Slap" a try. I found the basic catalyst of the novel, the "slap" at a typical family barbecue in a typical suburbian home, a tremendously powerful motif (though it may take having small children and having to live around them to fully relate with the incident). I thought the novel handled the full gamut of typical "life in suburbia" themes (death, adultery, alcoholism, inter-generational conflict ...) in an insightful, non-sentimental way. There is no "hero" to the story, and people who do pretty bad things and behave pretty badly generally seem to get away with it. Readers who will be offended by "immoral" behaviors (adultery, drug-use...) may resent the novel. I personally appreciate fallibility in main characters and a certain moral ambiguity in what I read since I think these add to a novel`s realism. Reader`s looking for a tougher version of "life in suburbia" will, I think, enjoy "The Slap".

I really wanted to like this book! I liked the premise, I thought it would be thought provoking and interesting to see where the characters go. Instead, after the description of the BBQ I just found the story boring. I managed to dislike almost all the characters. I don't understand the author's repeated inclusion of the "c" word and I found some of the sex scenes unnecessary and badly written. The one thing I did get out of this novel was an understanding about family and honour which comes through in the chapter on Manoli - being completely Anglo in almost every way, I didn't fully appreciate the loyalty to family that a lot other cultures have. So whilst I found the book did not live up to its potential, I did gain something from it!