I know. You’re suffering from Man Booker longlist fatigue too. However, I give you my word that this and Alan Warner’s The Stars in the Bright Sky are the only titles on the longlist that I have any interest in reading. For a while it seemed that Christos Tsiolkas‘ The Slap was the novel that everyone in Australia was reading, discussing and arguing over. It’s a little pleasing to know that the novel is having the same divisive effect overseas. Nonetheless, The Slap feels inherently Australian, so intimately linked with our issues as a nation and as a culture that I have to wonder if it has the same potency outside of our shores.

The Slap is also one of those books where you feel like a broken record in repeating the plot, so intrinsic is it to the title and the hype surrounding the book. At a barbeque in suburban Melbourne, fittingly with multicultural backgrounds and a variety of age groups present, a man slaps a misbehaving young boy who is not his own. The Slap follows the consequences and reverberations in the lives of those who witnessed the slap that afternoon. Intriguingly, all of the stories, despite the multicultural, gender and generational differences, are all told in the same the same third person voice.

I expected class to play a big role in The Slap, and was surprised to find it difficult to recognize any class aspects coming in to play. The Slap opens with the perspective of Hector, a man who is hosting the barbeque, and is feeling not so much trapped, but definitely unappreciative of the benefits of his middle class male existence. The parents of the slapped boy parrot politically correct dogma, echoing sentiment they believe they should have – and are noticably poorer than the rest of the characters. Sure, the characters throw around “middle-class” as an insult, but for the most part it seems that class has become such an intangible issue, secondary to cultural, gender and generational differences. Tsiolkas is forcing us to look at the negative aspects of all of these characters regardless of their financial position, we’re invited to explore their faults. The characters are hugely unlikeable, except for the two younger characters.

Anouk, a childless by choice writer on a television soap, should have by all rights appeal to my liberal sensibilities. She too has made the unpopular decision to not bear children – most of the female characters in The Slap are burdened by their choice to have children, motherhood defines them. She is a confounding character, it is difficult to understand how someone so supposedly intelligent can have such simplistic views about class and her friendship with Rosie. Why does someone who fiercely holds to her decisions in all other aspects of life so quickly back down for someone she doesn’t even like any more? It’s a question that is raised repeatedly through The Slap, and the answer seems to be compromise. It’s not a romanticized compromise, it’s a compromise always marked by bitterness and resentment.

Anouk’s liberal attitude only gets her so far though, and in particular it made me extremely frustrated that she is so ignorant about the culture that lies “out there”, beyond her inner city comfort zone. Her presumption that her usual treatment of immigrant men – a Muslim taxi driver in the given example – is above the “immense sea of indifferently racist Australians out there, a world that existed – as far as she could tell because she’d never visited ‘out there’ – somewhere beyond the yellow lines that marked the inner-city zone-one train and tram tracks on the Melbourne transport maps.” This hit hard, as I live in the forbidden blue zone two and I resented Anouk’s inner-city presumptions because it felt like they were, implicitly, a reflection on me. However, while doing some research on my electorate for the recent election, I discovered some interesting facts that reaffirmed my position. My electorate has the highest proportion of Muslim residents in Victoria, the third highest in Australia. For Anouk, Muslims represent her taxi drivers, “out here”, they are our neighbours, our friends, our colleagues. Yes, racism exists in the outer suburbs, but it is not any worse, or any better, than inner-city exclusive racism.

The shallowness of Anouk’s nameless apology for her rudeness to her taxi driver is later strengthened by Manolis’ later comments about the ease with which Australians say sorry. Forgiveness is a large part of the Slap, characters seek it, characters forgive for the wrong and right reasons, yet the hollowness of these apologies was always read through the lens of Manolis view, and reflected on the greater problems related to our own national and cultural apologies.

The words dropped easily from her lips but they meant nothing. Australians used the word like a chant. Sorry sorry sorry. She was not 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 that he would never ask a thing of her again. Sorry. He spat out the word as if it were poison.

Anouk is not the only frustrating character in The Slap, the other adult characters are completely unlikeable: emotionally unavailable, potentially violent and dangerous, dangerously irresponsible, constantly lying to each other and themselves. However, The Slap is thematically very rich, covering so many aspects of contemporary Australian life that it would be impossible to cover them all in one review. One other thing that had strong resonance with me was the nature of compromise. This could be because I am much too self-involved to truly understand the complexity of compromise involved in marriage, relationships and motherhood, but The Slap repeats that compromise made under the guises of these important roles are often made to someone characters are not even sure they like, let alone love. There is a deep-seated resentment behind these decisions which is not healthy. The Slap asks the question of where do our loyalties lie? With family? With friends? With strangers? With ourselves? The answer is never clear, and identity is so built upon traditional roles that, by their very nature, force us to define ourselves in relation to another.

Again she experiences a wave of weariness, a numbing heaviness to her neck and shoulders, to her very bones. This, finally, was love. This was its shape and essence, once the lust and ecstasy and danger and adventure had gone. Love, at its core, was negotiation, the surrender of two individuals to the messy, banal, domestic realities of sharing a life together. In this way, in love, she could secure a familiar happiness. She had to forego the risk of an unknown, most likely impossible, most probably unattainable, alternative happiness. She couldn’t take the risk. She was too tired.

And then, there is Connie and Richie. One of the things I loved about Tsiolkas’ debut novel Loaded (incidentally, does anyone else think that the Ari at the barbeque who gave Hector speed could possibly be Ari from Loaded? Just coincidence, or a wink to knowing readers?) was the exploration of a multitude of complex issues and themes related to growing up in Australia through the energy and exuberance of youth. Tsiolkas knows how to write about adolescence in a way that, compared to the hateful and bitter adults, gives hope: I almost wonder why he is content writing about middle-class, middle-aged bores when the real passion and excitement comes through his sensitive treatment of his younger characters. Connie and Richie are marked by a fear and anticipation of the future, but in their confrontation with their future, they change in a way that the adult characters can not. Previously held prejudices disintegrate as they learn, adapt and evolve. They are the only ones truly willing to forgive their friends and family of minor and major transgressions, and thus the real hope of The Slap lies with them.

In summary, I can’t honestly say that I liked The Slap. It didn’t leave me giddy with pleasure, but it did force me to think about issues about identity and compromise, and for that I am appreciative. It begins to approach the problems and concerns confronting contemporary Australian society in a way that is easy to relate to, yet avoids taking an overly moral tone. It is a completely frustrating novel for so many reasons, but absolutely a worthwhile read.