Christos Tsiolkas: 'There's love in this book'
Booker-longlisted novel The Slap has been described as a 'modern masterpiece' and 'unbelievably misogynistic'. Christos Tsiolkas is pleased it is making readers angry
Aida Edemariam
The Guardian, Saturday 7 August 2010 


Left - Christos Tsiolkas: ‘It’s my generation that I think is screwed up. They’re selfish and hypocritical and that’s what I want to reveal.’ Photograph: Paul McCarthy for the Guardian

For someone who has written what has been called the most divisive Booker-nominated novel in years – partly because it is so angry and bleak, so full of potential, sometimes realised, violence – Christos Tsiolkas seems a gentle man, sweet and eager to please. He bows when we meet – "it's just the way I grew up" – and leads us flusteredly around the lobby of a luxury hotel on the seafront outside Dublin, where he is doing a reading as part of an extended publicity tour, looking for a quiet corner in which his very quiet voice won't be drowned out by the clatter of breakfast plates.

The Slap begins at a suburban barbeque in Melbourne, where one of the guests administers said slap to a three-year-old brat who is not his own. It then unfolds in seven intense chapters, each from the point of view of one of the guests. An international bestseller well before the Booker judges longlisted it, and the winner of the 2009 Commonwealth writers' prize, The Slap has been described as "riveting from beginning to end" (by Jane Smiley in the Guardian Review); "powerful", "dazzling", a "modern masterpiece"; "Neighbours as Philip Roth might have written it" (according to the Sunday Times), and "reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Don DeLillo's Underworld" (thus Colm Toíbín, rather naughtily, as it is produced here by an imprint he co-runs and who has been friends with Tsiolkas for years). It has also been called offensive and cynical and "unbelievably misogynistic"; "the whole novel has this ludicrous comedy-macho sensibility," objected journalist India Knight. "You get the feeling that if he'd been forced to read 'literary' fiction, Raoul Moat would have gulped it down at one sitting." "There is no joy, no love, no hope, no beauty [in it]," she added, for good measure. "Just hideous people beating each other up, either physically or emotionally."

The idea for the novel came from a real slap, at a real barbeque, where Tsiolkas's mother, who emigrated from rural Greece in the 1960s, cuffed, lightly, a three-year-old who was getting under her feet – whereupon the child put his hands on his hips and announced: "Nobody has the right to put their hands on my body without my permission." Everyone laughed, and there were no repercussions (in the novel the child's parents, white Australians, charge Harry, a second-generation Greek-Australian, with assault). Tsiolkas was set thinking about how the different groups and generations in modern-day multicultural Australia co-exist.

Tsiolkas's parents emigrated from Greece, post-second world war, post-civil war (Tsiolkas is, en passant, scathing about modern-day Greeks who seem unable to empathise with people now coming to their own country for exactly the same reason). Both parents were factory workers who slotted straight into an already strong Greek community in Melbourne. Christos didn't speak English until he went to school. "I thought Australians spoke Greek. I was shocked to find that there was this other language I had to learn." Every week, on payday, his father would stop by a bookshop and buy him two books. "He can't read English. So sometimes it would be Great Expectations, sometimes it would be Mills and Boon, sometimes it would be Jaws. He once got me Henry Miller." It was a convivial and argumentative household, politically engaged – his mother, unlike the highly conservative Greek mother in his book, who pounds the floor until her hands bleed when her son Hector marries an Indian woman – is very left wing.

Tsiolkas, now 44, realised fairly early on that he was gay, and that the only way to ensure that he grew up on his own terms was to rebel against his traditional, patriarchal background and leave home – for university (where he fell in love with his room-mate, Shane, a cartographer; they are still together 25 years later) and thus the middle-classes; for writing, and a part-time job, until recently, as a veterinary assistant. (In The Slap one of the characters is a nurse with her own practice.)
The full review at The Guardian.

And read the review by Maggie Rainey-Smith on this blog in May 2009