KEY POINTS:
Tsiolkas' fourth novel starts with a man slapping someone else's kid - after the spoilt, snatching, screaming 3-year-old has just kicked him savagely in the shins - at a backyard barbecue in the Melbourne suburbs.
The wonderfully repulsive Hugo certainly deserves correction. But does he deserve it in this form or from this person? The repercussions are instant and, apparently, endless. They lead or link to issues of infidelity, ageing, cultural conditioning, parenting and a great deal of substance abuse across three generations of family and friends. An entire sepulchre of family skeletons get raised and rattled.
After the globe-spanning, epic sprawl of Dead Europe, Tsiolkas now builds a close-up, intensely-rendered study of one small moment and its enormous consequences. It's an examination of taboos and limits - political, personal, sexual, even commercial. But mainly, it's a story with the impetus of an avalanche. It's crammed with vividly-realised settings and sequences: a bedroom with a giant plasma television flanked by waterfalls; the grime and smut of a service station; Melbourne's western suburbs, "flat and monotonous, grey and muted, functional and drab"; idyllic beaches; sex in sticky/sweaty/slithery profusion.
The story comes in eight long sections, each told by a different barbecue participant. Some side with the horrible Hugo; some with the family friend who delivers the smack (to an unspecified area). There's a full range of perspectives, prejudices, passions, proclivities.
We start with Hector, who "simply loved women" - though nothing is simple in this layered, labyrinthine, undeniably long story. There's Bilal, the aboriginal, now-Islamic, friend; Anouk, exotic TV soap director; Rhys, the testicle-scratching screen heart-throb; confused Connie and victimised Richie. And there are the combatants: Harry the slapper (as it were), decent and devout and sadly lusting after teenage girls; Rosie, mother of the monster, a study in devotion turned to obsession, with her glacial mother and chaotic husband.
Tsiolkas is savage about the greed and essential mediocrity of his mainly new-Australian, mainly middle-class characters, yet he finds them endlessly absorbing. He also finds redeeming qualities in them: affection, commitment, stoicism, a painful willingness to change, glints of idealism all the more poignant for their brevity. The writing pulses, pounces, sometimes postures.
The plot barges along, and would benefit from less matter and less noise. But compared to the fury plus sickly sentiment alternating with indifference that characterises so much of our discourse on child abuse, it's great to encounter a treatment so adult and ambivalent.
The Slap
By Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin $37.99)
