The literary avant are still singing a tired old tune.
Catherine Parish
Years of disappointment still haven’t entirely killed my optimism when opening a new modern novel of the acclaimed variety. The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas, recently shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, is the latest offering I have sampled with high hopes.
As the pages turned, my indignation rose higher. Briefly, the story uses a slap administered to a recalcitrant child by someone unrelated to him at a barbeque as a vehicle to explore the lives of several different characters who were present at the time. Another slap occurs near the end, in what I presume is supposed to be a clever literary counterpoint.
Sure, Tsiolkas ticks all the politically correct boxes – cultural identity and ethnicity, drugs, sexuality questions, alienation, relationships, family etc but his book fails to elicit that deep and spontaneous response, that recognition of deep human truth in a story or a character that marks out a worthwhile and memorable read.
He has crafted a novel (and quite unevenly) but I can’t quite work out for what market, unless it be for like-minded, politically correct souls who just happen to sit on literary judging panels.
The further one gets into it, the worse it all seems. Supposedly an examination of middle Australia, it utterly fails to engage this reader who lives in this very milieu. It is almost as though the author is observing some half-seen rituals of an alien culture and writing them down in forensic detail, but without any true understanding of – or any wish to understand – what he is witnessing.
He seems to have little empathy for those about whom he writes, a strange irony for an author. It is, oddly enough, quite puritanical in its condemnatory presentation of all these apparently irredeemably hypocritical, unpleasant people doing nasty things to each other. There seem to be no consequences or ramifications of some of the cataclysmically awful things that happen in the book.
The Slap is a book entirely without a heart. Much can be forgiven an author if they have the ability to get under your skin with their story. But The Slap has tragically little of value to offer on any deep emotional terms.
In so far as there is emotion, it tends towards visceral, reactionary anger and hatred. Tsiolkas seems to have the most trivial idea of human relationships; they are all so shallow, reduced to the most mechanical level, and there seems to be no warmth and no real love in any of the lives examined.
Yet isn’t that search for love and that conviction that we have at last found it, the driver in so many of our relationships, failed or successful? Isn’t love really what we are all looking for? The human search, the human need for love is a far more compelling tale than all the ‘angsty,’ and sometimes downright disturbing, bed-hopping that goes on in The Slap.
It is certainly why young women read novels like Twilight, the phenomenally successful teen novel by Stephenie Meyer. Whilst I have my reservations about Twilight, you can’t deny that Meyer has much more successfully keyed into a deep and universally felt human truth that is totally absent from Tsiolkas’s book. Just about everyone is looking for the possibility of love, that mutual recognition of a true soul mate, the one who will fill the empty space within our hearts, the one we are meant for and who is meant for us.
Meyer’s readers, it seems, don’t want the hot and sweaty, heartless and meaningless grapplings of faithless people graphically described. They want that moment of high romance from which in our heart of hearts we ideally still segue into real love, and on into the lifelong task of melding two into one, of building something real and true and solid and lasting from that romance.
It seems wicked that we are being asked to believe that faithful relationships are largely impossible, and sexual exploitation of various kinds, shallow infidelity and trashy one night stands are now the standard stuff of ‘real life’. Miserable stuff indeed.