The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

“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.” (P. 40)

The Slap by Australian author Christos Tsiolkas has been long listed for The Booker Prize and has won two other awards and been short listed for two others and it starts with a very simple premise: at a suburban Melbourne BBQ, an unruly child is slapped by an unrelated adult.  Told in eight sections with each section narrated by someone who was at that BBQ: the host, the hostess, the slapper, the child’s mother, etc.  The narratives follow a chronological sequence rather than simply retelling a single event.  We do get the different perspectives of what happened at the BBQ as people reflect back on the event and their feelings about what happened but we also learn about their lives and their pasts while they each deal with the aftermath of the slap.

Tsiolkas discusses a vast array of current issues in this novel, both in passing and in detail: Alcoholism, private versus public education, adultery, entitled children, breast feeding, having children, not having children, the immigrant experience, the aborigine experience, and growing old.  It is a lot to pack into 482 pages and at times during the first part of the novel I felt like I was reading my internet message board or Dear Abby letters: Dear Abby, my friend is still breast feeding her four year old and I feel like she is doing it more for her own benefit rather than for the child’s. How do I make her see this?

However, in the 5th and 6th sections, Tsiolkas started to win me over and I could see the bigger picture he was trying to paint beyond the laundry list of societal issues, the complexity of the questions he was really asking.

What is the definition of family, of loyalty, or honor?

How do you learn to live with who you are?

Are you defined by what other people think of you or can your forge your own path?

How do you live with split loyalties and what compromises do you need to make in your life?

Where is the line between being true to yourself as an individual and being true to your family or your peers?

In the end, Tsiolkas leaves you in a state of ambiguity.  Just as there is no final resolution of the slap and its rightness or wrongness; the narrators reflect on these questions and often come up with different answers.  In Tsiolkas’s world, there are no easy solutions or straightforward pathways – we just have to muddle through as best be can, often being unable to articulate clearly to others exactly where we are in the process.  This can be best summed up with quotes from two very different people: a forty year old career woman, mother, hostess to the party and best friend of the mother of the child and an 18 year old young man trying to determine who he is and his place in the world.  What they do have in common is they are both trying to find a way to have peace and happiness in their lives – they are both trying to find a pathway through life.

Aisha breathed out, experiencing a moment of blessed relief and for an instant that flashed by so quickly she barely registered, she also felt a pang of regret…what couldn’t be, what you didn’t ever want to be, but which you could not also help wonder what could have been.” (p. 391)

He wanted to know why Richie had wanted to kill himself.  The boy struggled to find words.  It all seemed too hard to explain.  Maybe this was what Connie understood, that the truth didn’t always have words. (p. 471)

The book was better than I first thought it would be.  If The Slap were a person I would describe that person as a talkative, somewhat self-involved drama queen with hidden layers of complexity and a ever so slightly annoying ambiguity.  I thought the writing was a little uneven, however two of the sections (Rosie and Manolis) really stood out and were outstanding.  Overall  I am glad to have read it – not only for an examination of the aftermath of such a startling incident but also for the opportunity to contemplate some of the larger questions raised by the author.