Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap: A Novel

Table of Contents

The best politicians are those who can instinctively divine the zeitgeist of their countrys centre. For the ones who cant, I would place The Slap as mandatory bedside table reading. Its a perfect social document.... More importantly, its also a hell of a read.

The Slap is that rare and mesmerising combination of master storytelling and brilliant characterisation.... The eloquence, pathos and ruthless honesty of this new novel make it an unsettling, but thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding read.

A contemporary Australian masterpiece.

With The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas secures his place as one of Australias most important novelists.... It is thrilling to have our life reflected back at us so accurately.... Tsiolkas has written an absolute ripper.

One of the years most-talked-about novels. It is about all of those prickly things in life: marriage, love, sex, race, friendship, food, and drugs.... The Slap is at times a disturbing book, but it is also funny and endearing, presenting the diversity of the Australian experience with a big, warm heart in the middle.

A controversial and daring novel, The Slap uses the iconic scene of a suburban Australian barbecue to examine identities and personal relationships in a multicultural society. Offering points of view from eight different characters, it taps into universal tensions and dilemmas around family life and child-rearing. This book is sure to challenge readers and provoke debate.

Committee for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009

CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS is the author of Loaded, which was made into the feature film Head-On, The Jesus Man, and Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award. The Slap was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Australian Booksellers Award for Book of the Year, and the Australian Literary Societys Gold Medal. Tsiolkas is also a playwright, essayist, and screenwriter. He lives in Melbourne.

for Jane Palfreyman, who is sui generis

His eyes still shut, a dream dissolving and already impossible to recall, Hectors hand sluggishly reached across the bed. Good. Aish was up. He let out a victorious fart, burying his face deep into the pillow to escape the clammy methane stink. I dont want to sleep in a boys locker room, Aisha would always complain on the rare, inadvertent moments when he forgot himself in front of her. Through the years he had learned to rein his body in, to allow himself to only let go in solitude; farting and pissing in the shower, burping alone in the car, not washing or brushing his teeth all weekend when she was away at conferences. It was not that his wife was a prude, she just seemed to barely tolerate the smells and expressions of the male body. He himself would have no problem falling asleep in a girls locker room, surrounded by the moist, heady fragrance of sweet young cunt. Afloat, still half-entrapped in sleeps tender clutch, he twisted onto his back and shifted the sheet off his body. Sweet young cunt. Hed spoken out loud.

Connie.

At the thought of her, sleep surrendered its grip on him. Aish would think him a pervert if she had overheard him. But he was definitely not that. He simply loved women. Young, old, those just starting to blossom and those beginning to fade. And sheepishly, almost embarrassed at his own vanity, he knew that women loved him. Women loved him.

Get up, Hector, he said to himself. Time for the routine.

The routine was a series of exercises that he executed without fail 7 every morning. At most, it never lasted more than twenty minutes. Occasionally, if he woke with a headache or hangover, or with a combination of both, or simply with an ennui that seemed to issue from deep within what he could only assume to be his soul, he managed to complete it all in under ten minutes. It was not strict adherence to the routine that mattered but simply ensuring its completioneven when he was sick, he would force himself to do it. He would rise, grab a pair of track-pants, throw on the T-shirt hed worn the previous day and then perform a series of nine stretches, each of which he would hold to a count of thirty. Then he would lie on the rug in the bedroom and perform one hundred and fifty sit-ups, and fifty push-ups. Hed finish with a final set of three stretches. Then hed go to the kitchen and switch on the coffee percolator before walking to the milk bar at the end of the street to buy the newspaper and a packet of cigarettes. Back home, he would pour himself a coffee, walk out onto the back verandah, light a smoke, turn to the sports pages, and begin to read. In that moment, with the newspaper spread before him, the whiff of bitter coffee in his nostrils, the first hit of sharp tobacco smoke, whatever the miseries, petty bullshits, stresses and anxieties of the day before or the day ahead, none of it mattered. In that moment, and if only in that moment, he was happy.

Hector had discovered from childhood that the only way to challenge the inert, suffocating joy of sleep was to barrel right through it, to force open his eyes and jump straight out of the bed. But for once, he lay back on his pillow and allowed the sounds of his family to gently bring him to complete wakefulness. Aisha had the kitchen stereo turned to an FM classical music station, and Beethovens Ninth Symphony was flooding the house. From the lounge room, he could hear the electronic squeaks and tinny reverb of a computer game. He lay still for a moment, then threw back the sheet and looked down at his naked body. He raised his right foot and watched it crash back on the bed. Todays the day, Hector, he told himself, todays the day. He leapt out of bed and put on a pair of red Y-fronts, pulled a singlet over his head, took a long, loud piss in the ensuite, and stormed into the kitchen. Aisha was breaking eggs over a frying pan and he kissed her neck. The kitchen smelt of coffee. He switched off the radio in mid-crescendo.

Hey, I was listening to that.

Hector flicked through a nest of CDs stacked clumsily next to the CD player. He pulled a disc out of its case and put it into the machine. He pushed through the numbers till he found the track he wanted, then smiled as the first confident notes of Louis Armstrongs trumpet began to sound. He kissed his wifes neck again.

Its got to be Satchmo today, he whispered to her. Its got to be West End Blues.

He performed his exercises slowly, counting up to thirty in slow, measured breaths. Between each set he swayed to the slow-building sensual progression of the jazz music. He made sure that with every sit-up he felt the tightening of the muscles in his belly, and with every push-up, he was conscious of the pull of the muscles on his triceps and pecs. He wanted to be alert to his body today. He wanted to know that it was alive, strong and prepared.

On finishing, he wiped the sweat from his brow, picked his shirt off the floor where he had flung it the night before, and slipped his feet into his sandals.