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46 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A sharp slap against middle class life, August 21, 2010
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.
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19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Behind the Shiny Suburban Mask, June 27, 2010
This review is from: The Slap: A Novel (Paperback)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
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.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Neighbours - the novel, November 10, 2009
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
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