ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

This is a deliberately provocative book.  Laced with filthy language and carnal appetites, it takes on a sacred cow in the opening chapter when an adult slaps an undisciplined brat.  I can just imagine the sniffs of disapproval as people read it…

The blurb tells us what is going to happen.  There’s a barbecue in the suburbs, and as the booze starts to flow and the children start to squabble, the brat goes to strike another child with a cricket bat, and Harry – who is no relation – rushes over to intervene when the parent doesn’t.  When the brat kicks him, Harry slaps him. 

‘You’re out, Hugo, you bloody spoil-sport.’ Rocco, at the end of his tether, went to grab the bat from the younger boy. With another scream Hugo evaded the older boy’s hands, and then, leaning back, he lifted the bat.  Hector froze. He’s going to hit him.  He’s going to belt Rocco with the bat.

In the second that it took Hector to release his breath, he saw Ravi jump towards the boys, he heard Gary’s furious curse, and he saw Harry push past all of them and grab at Hugo.  He lifted the boy up in the air, and in shock the boy dropped the bat.

‘Let me go,’ Hugo roared.

Harry set him on the ground.  The boy’s face had gone dark with fury.  He raised his foot and kicked wildly into Harry’s shin. The speed was coursing through Hector’s blood, the hairs on his neck were upright.  He saw his cousin’s raised arm, it spliced the air, and then he saw the open palm descend and strike the boy.  The slap seemed to echo.  It cracked the twilight.  The little boy looked up at the man in shock.  There was a long silence. …(p40)

From then on the conflict is between competing child-rearing ideologies and it escalates out of all proportion, cleaving families and friendships as it tests loyalties and ethics.

This story paints an extraordinary picture of suburban life.   Tsiolkas claims to be depicting a new kind of middle class:

“I wanted to write about suburbia and I wanted to write about a new kind of middle class that had its roots in the old working class and in other places,” he said. “It felt like that had never been represented in our pages, that had never been shown on our screens. Maybe that is an element of the book that has challenged people or interested people.”  (Source: ABC News Online 16.4.09)

It’s not depicting any kind of Australian middle class behaviour that I recognise, and indeed the Miles Franklin judges who shortlisted the book say that all the books share a common theme of ‘scrutinising extreme behaviour’ (Source: ABC News Online 16.4.09)  so I find his comment interesting.  And does Tsiolkas not know that the Australian middle class has always had its roots in the working class? 

BEWARE: SOME SPOILERS

Perhaps what he is talking about is the emergence of postwar migrants and Aborigines into the middle class?  He has gone out of his way to render Melbourne as a multi-cultural melting pot, inclusive of young and old; married, single and divorced; and gay and straight.  One of the Greek men has married ‘out’ much to Koula’s disapproval:  Aisha the vet is Indian.  An Aboriginal man has given up the grog to become a Muslim and changed his name from Terry to Bilal.  He’s married to Shamira and they have children called Ibby and Sonja.   Elizabeth, Hector’s sister is a single mother of two boys called Sava and Angeliki.  Hector’s workmates from the Tax Office include Dedj who’s from the Balkans, Leanna, and the enigmatic Muslim Ari.  Anouk and Rhys work in the arts: she’s a writer of soap operas and is supporting his career as an actor.  Perhaps this kind of cultural diversity is a surprise to some, but not to those of us who live or work or shop in the suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney.

Everyone  is sexually active including extra-maritally, except old Manolis, his wife and their friends.  Much is made of Rosie still breast-feeding Hugo at four, but what I found distasteful was the way Tsiolkas depicted most of his raunchy males slavering over women wherever they were.  For them, the female is a sex object, and they don’t let up.  How could any female have a conversation or a professional relationship with men like this?  

There’s an extraordinary amount of drug-taking, as if it’s routine.  Well, maybe it is in Tsiolkas’ circles, but it’s actually dysfunctional in the broader Australian society.  Less than 20% of people take cannabis, the most widely used drug, and its use is declining.  The percentage of people who take hard drugs is miniscule, mostly less than 1% while amphetamines and ecstasy hover around 3%. (Source: Australian Institute of Criminology).  But then the amount of filthy language used is dysfunctional too.  Adolescents use it in shopping centres to shock, and few of us can avoid hearing it every now and again, but the way it’s sprinkled through the dialogue in The Slap like 100s and 1000s on fairy bread is bizarre.  I’ve worked and shopped and socialised in working-class suburbs throughout my career as a teacher, and I’ve never heard language used quite like this.   What is Tsiolkas trying to achieve by using it, I wonder?

(Pause – to browse through Dead Europe by the same author on my TBR.  Every page I opened – at random – had similar obscenities: p211, p282, p148, p361, and there was a similar preoccupation with seedy sex: p137.   It seems to be Tsiolkas’ default language. )

The story is  told from the point of view of eight of a large cast of characters:

• Hector, father of two and married to Aisha but fancies her assistant Connie. 
• Harry, ‘the villain’.  Hector’s cousin, a successful mechanic and owner of three small businesses.  He’s married to Sandi and father of 8 year old Rocco. 
• Rosalind (Rosie), married to Gary the drunk and earth-mother to the brat, Hugo.
• Connie, orphaned, still at school and living with her aunt.
• Manolis, Hector’s father and Harry’s uncle.  Married to Koula. 
• Aisha, Hector’s wife. A vet. Mother of Melissa and Adam.
• Richie, Connie’s friend and coming to terms with being gay.

A recurring sub-theme is the public v private school arguments.  This begins when Harry and Sandi – who’ve left their ‘westie’ childhoods behind them – announce that they’re sending Rocco in a ‘beachside private school’.  This produces the usual stances – we’ve all read them in the annual Back-to-School features in The Age.  What is interesting to me is Harry’s comment that ‘Australians don’t give a f- about their children’ – as if he, born in Australia himself, is not Australian.   This is a rather odd attitude to have about your own country.  Hector and Aisha are in conflict over the issue too, and for once Tsiolkas seems to lose control of his material and lapse into pontificating.  Clearly this is an issue that he feels strongly about and I think we can take it that Hector’s voice is his own.

‘You knew when you married me that this was the way I felt.  I’m not going to change.  I can’t be a man who sends his children to private schools.‘ (p395)

I  felt very sorry for Manolis when Aisha rejected his fence-mending overtures.  She is so exercised by Harry’s action that she’s never going to forgive him and will always define him as a monster.  She will not, she says, attend his party, not even to please her father-in-law, and he is devastated.  Her ease in rejecting him shocks him to the core:

‘You are not my father.’

He wished he could slap her.  So it all meant nothing, all those years of shared jokes, of affection, of defending her, of caring for her children, of assisting her and Hector with money and with time.  Love and family meant nothing to her? Nothing mattered to her at the moment but her pride. (p340)

He realises he has been a fool….

‘Manoli, I’m sorry.’

He turned his back to her and walked away.  The words dropped from her lips but they meant nothing.  Australians used the word like a chant.  Sorry sorry sorry.  He thought she loved him, respected him.  He’d nursed this hope for years.  He wanted to strike himself for his vanity and foolishness.  He had never asked anything of her before and she must know he would never ask anything of her again.  Sorry.  He spat out the word as if it were poison.

He thought she loved him.  He was just a silly old man. (p340-1) 

There are times when Tsiolkas’ provocations really jar.  In the milieu of The Slap, anti Americanism is de rigeur but the way the exchange between Paraskevi and Emmanuel is resolved is beyond unpleasant:

‘…the Americans rule everything.’

‘They destroy everything.’ Paraskevi undid the clasp from her veil, swung her head and let her hair fall around her shoulders.  ‘No one dares to do anything to them.’

Emmanuel shook his head.  ‘That’s not true, that lad, that Arab, he managed to bomb New York’.

‘And good on him’.

Katina frowned.  ‘Paraskevi, you’ve just lost a husband.  Think of all the widows who grieved in New York.’

Paraskevi made a loud squishing noise with her lips…’Katina, are you serious?  With all the suffering in the world you want me to care about the damn Americans? ‘  They all burst into merriment at the joke of it. (p311)

Are there really people here in suburban Melbourne who would think this funny?

Connie’s behaviour is a mystery to me.  She seems a fairly well-adjusted girl, given her circumstances.  Her gay father in the UK, having infected his wife, so that she died of AIDS, wrote her aunt a death-bed confession -which Connie has read.  Her aunt, Tasha has made a relaxed and welcoming home for her, and despite working part time at Aisha’s vet clinic and having an active social life and drug habit, Connie does brilliantly well at school – getting into vet science at Melbourne.   Her scene in the bathtub and a subsequent failed seduction by Ari suggests that any relationship she had with Hector went no further than fantasy yet she tells Richie that he had raped her (p181).  Was this because she knew that Richie fancied Hector too, and wanted to claim him as heterosexual?  It’s bizarre. Hector is married with two children.  It’s an odd way to assert that the man wouldn’t be interested in Richie, and it eventually causes all kinds of grief when Richie blurts it out to Aisha. (p463-4).

Of all these rather unlikeable characters, I think I like Aisha least.  In Bali, fresh from a fling at a conference, she reacts to Hector’s emotional outbursts with detachment.  It’s cathartic for him (p396-8) and they spend a day in mutual confessions, but this sequence shows that she really only cares about her children.  She fancies him in bed, but she gets tired of his revelations (p404) and she doesn’t want her life to be shattered if he falls apart (p405).  

‘I don’t deserve you.’    Oh Christ, don’t let him start crying again. ‘I’m so ashamed, Aish.’

She too looked down at the menu.  She had no idea what would be the right thing to say.  She felt bereft, drained of any compassion or sympathy towards him.  At the same time she felt him to be completely in her care.  It was this distance between her intentions and her desire that was making her so weary.  She would have felt furious if he had not felt shame.  But she did not want to minister to his grief, his self-pity and to his sense of failure.  A cruel thought flashed quickly and guiltily in her mind: be a man, deal with your — mid-life crisis – it is so boring.’ (p406)

Then, having broken Manolis’ heart and made such a fuss about how she couldn’t possibly betray her friendship with Rosie by attending Harry’s party, Aisha was relieved to be rid of that friendship when Rosie (predictably) overreacted to her change of heart.  (p624)   When Aisha agreed firstly to contact  Harry’s wife to congratulate her about a much wanted pregnancy and then to attend the party, it looked like the emergence of some maturity but turns out to be simply further selfishness.  Manolis is right about Aisha – she’s shallow and unkind, and she loves to take the moral high ground.  While she dismisses her own adultery as unimportant, she is outraged by Hector’s confessions, and she won’t forgive anyone else’s transgressions.  She labels Harry as irretrievably violent because of a single long-ago and long-forgiven incident of domestic violence (p407) and because of the slap.

‘He’s never hit her again.’

‘So he says’.  Aisha lifted her head and looked her husband straight in the eyes.  ‘I will visit Sandi, I will be a friend.  But I will never forgive your cousin, do you understand?  I hate him.  I detest that he is in my life.’ (p408)

What Aisha cares about is her family (which she defines as nuclear, not extended), work and friends.  She likes being married to a man who ‘still made women’s heads turn’  as if he is some sort of stud prize and she’s worried about the change in his behaviour not for his sake but because of the effects it might have on her. (p410)

Rosalind isn’t very nice either but her selfishness is bound up in her child.  She is obsessed with Hugo, always putting him first and indifferent to the effect his behaviour has on others.  The child is so unmanageable that when he spits and kicks at a harmless old man at the traffic lights, he even manages to anger placid, loving Richie, (p455-7) – but it is Hugo’s perspective Rosie wants to hear and believe. 

[Hugo] pointed at Richie. ‘He hurt me.’

Richie backed away, onto the verandah.  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ he protested, wanting to point at Hugo, needing them to know how unfair all this was. ‘Hugo spat at an old man.  I told him off.  That’s what happened.’

The two adults looked stunned.  Rosie shook her head. ‘I can’t believe that.’ She stroked Hugo’s hair. ‘Did the old man scare you?’

Richie’s mouth dropped open….(p458).

All Richie’s hours and weeks of loving child care and affection count for nothing in the face of Hugo’s accusation.  Gary believes what Richie says and tries to intervene, but Rosie is oblivious.  Teachers encounter parents like this all the time: ‘Oh, no, my child wouldn’t do that!‘ they say, as if it’s impossible, and like Rosie, they cast around for someone else to blame.  It’s very trying, and it’s disastrous for the child’s friendships because of course the other children think it’s not fair and don’t want to play with the child.  I don’t see Hugo making a success of his Prep year, not at all!

Rosie lies to Hugo about the outcome of the court case because she has promised him ‘justice’ that she cannot deliver, and this is consistent with her foolish capitulation to the child’s ego.  Gary, her drunken husband is no great shakes either, but it’s clear he’s fed up and doesn’t know how to handle the way his child dominates the household.  Will it be a new start for them in Daylesford?  I doubt it!

There is a small lapse in what appears otherwise to be good research.  The Indonesian currency is the rupiah, not the baht, and thank you in Bahasa Indonesia is ‘terima kasih’ not ‘terima kasim’.  (p378 and p384)  An editor should have picked this up.  

The Slap won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ prize for the Best Book in South East Asia (up against such notables as Helen Garner, Tim Winton, and Aravind Adiga) and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin 2009.   We had a lively discussion about it on ANZ LitLovers, and book groups all over the country are wrestling with its themes.  Whether it wins the ultimate Australian award or not, it is already walking off the shelves at the bookshops!

Author: Christos Tsiolkas
Title: The Slap
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN:9781741753592
Source: Personal copy, purchased at Readings $32.95