The Slap; review.

By Simon.

The Slap isn't an official Kaiser Book Club book.

I’d picked up and put down Chistos Tsiolkos’ The Slap on many visits to the bookshop but always decided I had a long enough queue of potentially better books waiting for me on the bedside table. As it turned out, my wife read it so I ended up taking it off her bedside table and starting it. Aside from now having read a book that has been much talked about, I needn’t have bothered.

The Slap is set in suburban Melbourne; the premise being a brat is slapped at a BBQ by someone who isn’t the kid’s parents. The story and so-called aftermath is told from the point of view, in the third person, by eight of the characters who were at said BBQ blah blah blah.

The Slap trades on cliché after cliché, presents eight entirely unlikable characters (some are downright hateable), evokes little more than mild curiosity for how the main plotline will unfold, and leaves the reader trying to work out if Tsiolkas is a self hating ‘wog’ (his word) or is a reverse racist; the parents of the slapped child are the alcoholic father, Gary, and the mother, Rosie, pathetically and absurdly dependant on her child Hugo... these are among only a few ‘white’ Australians that really feature in the book. I say self-hating because every character we explore with any depth is some, or all, of the following things – racist, misogynistic, narcissistic, slutty, dumb, arrogant, unfaithful etc etc.

The Slap is overly and unnecessarily filled with sex and bad language which only served to make me like each character less and less. (Unnecessary unless hating the characters was the author’s point). On occasions the narrative goes off on tangents that are hackneyed, and felt only like boring looks at the life of immigrant (first, second and third generation) Melbourne, that had no real bearing on anything to do with the plot.

In saying all this, I’m glad I read it. If I hadn’t it would still be ahead of me, waiting. I’m undecided on if I will read another Tsiolkos book or not. Time will tell.

I give The Slap 2 stars based on the characters being well enough written for me to hate them.