Slap author Christos Tsiolkas takes swipe at 'dry' European fiction
European books are 'academic in a cheap, shitey way', says Australian who wrote Booker-longlisted novel The Slap
Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer,  guardian.co.uk, Sunday 15 August 2010 

Left - Christos Tsiolkas: 'I want something more rigorous'. Photograph: Paul McCarthy for the Guardian

The author of the Booker-longlisted novel The Slap – which has been published to a storm of both dazzled praise and furious accusations of misogyny – has hit out at the quality of European fiction, calling it "dry" and "academic in a cheap, shitey way".

  Christos Tsiolkas, the Australian author of the most divisive book to have been chosen for the Man Booker longlist in years, contrasted American masterpieces such as John Updike's Couples ‑ "a fantastic book, a lacerating book about relationships" ‑ with recent European fiction.

"A friend of mine gave me a book of the best European short stories of 2009. I was instantly struck by how dry and academic they were, and not in the best way, in a cheap, shitey way," he told the Edinburgh international book festival.
He added: "They didn't talk about the real. I want something more rigorous, more challenging than I am finding at the moment."
By contrast, the great books about the American suburban experiences, such as Couples, have "a fearlessness that I am hungry for", he said.

Tsiolkas, whose family emigrated to Australia from Greece, added: "Every time I come to Europe I feel less European. I feel Europeans are so much more class bound … it feels so much heavier here in Europe, not just in Scotland but in Greece, Italy. That must have an effect on your literature." Tsiolkas's The Slap, his fourth novel, takes as its starting point a barbecue in Melbourne. A three-year-old is misbehaving, and an adult, not the child's parent, administers a sharp slap. The story is told through the voices of eight characters, all of whom were present at the party. One reviewer described the book as "Neighbours as Philip Roth might have written it"; another called it "unbelievably misogynistic".

At the weekend, Tsiolkas countered the charges. "It's not a misogynistic book; it's about infantile men who are misogynistic," he said. Reviewers had confused the characters with their author: "I realised the difference reading Enid Blyton," he said.
He said that his novel was about the hypocrisy and selfishness of his own generation (he is 44): those who have enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and have spent their new-found wealth on "plasma TVs and crap".

Full piece at The Guardian.