Reading Order
The Slap Reading Order
Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap (2008) is a standalone novel structured around a single incident at a suburban Melbourne barbecue — a man slapping another couple's misbehaving four-year-old — told through eight perspectives, each belonging to a different person who was present. Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal, it is one of the most commercially successful literary novels in Australian publishing history.
Where to start
The Slap
Complete The Slap Book List
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The Slap
Christos Tsiolkas·2008·The complete novel. Entirely standalone. - Buy
Barracuda
OptionalChristos Tsiolkas·2013·Daniel Kelly, an Australian swimmer who was predicted to win gold at the Olympics and didn't, and the consequences of that failure — Tsiolkas's follow-up to The Slap; a companion in its portrait of Australian working-class and immigrant life, its unflinching treatment of difficult subjects, and its interest in male identity and failure. - Buy
The Jesus Man
OptionalChristos Tsiolkas·1999·Tommy and his family in suburban Melbourne — Tsiolkas's second novel; precursor to The Slap in its suburban Melbourne setting and its portrait of the violence, sexuality, and class tensions that lie beneath the surface of ordinary Australian family life.
The Slap — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Slap actually about?
The Slap uses the incident of a man slapping a child as a lens through which to examine a wide range of Australian social anxieties: about class and class mobility, about immigration and multiculturalism, about parenting styles, about masculinity, about race, about the relationship between the Greek-Australian community and mainstream Anglo-Australian culture. The eight perspectives that structure the novel — each belonging to a different character at the barbecue — give the incident a different meaning from each position: from Harry's perspective, the slap is a reasonable disciplinary response to a child out of control; from Aisha's perspective, it is a manifestation of Harry's broader violence; from Rosie's perspective, it is an assault on her son that must be addressed through the legal system; from Hector's perspective, it is a complication in his already complicated life. The novel is not primarily interested in whether the slap was right or wrong — it is interested in what the different reactions to the slap reveal about the people having them, and about the society they inhabit.
Why is The Slap controversial?
The Slap generated significant controversy on publication — some of it about its content, some of it about its literary quality. On content: the novel is sexually explicit, it contains violence (including the slap itself but also more serious domestic violence), and it presents its characters' racism, sexism, and class prejudice without the comfortable distance of irony or authorial judgment; some readers found this confrontational mode gratuitously offensive. On literary quality: the novel was enormously commercially successful in Australia, where it was adapted as a television series in 2011, and some literary critics felt that its commercial success and its deliberately accessible style were incompatible with the prestige of the literary prizes it won. Tsiolkas has defended the novel's approach as an attempt to write honestly about contemporary Australian society rather than to flatter his readers' self-image — to show what a multicultural, ostensibly tolerant society looks like from the inside when it is put under pressure.
How does The Slap represent multicultural Australia?
The Slap's cast is deliberately multicultural: the host Hector is Greek-Australian; his wife Aisha is of Indian background; Harry, who slaps the child, is also Greek-Australian; Rosie, the child's mother, is Anglo-Australian; other characters are of Aboriginal, South Asian, and other backgrounds. The novel is interested in how Australia's official commitment to multiculturalism plays out in the actual social dynamics of a middle-class suburb — and specifically in the gap between the tolerant, multicultural self-image that most of Tsiolkas's characters have and the class prejudices, racial assumptions, and cultural hierarchies that emerge when they are put under stress. The Greek-Australian community is given particular attention: Hector's father Manolis and the older generation of Greek immigrants represent a set of values about family, masculinity, and community that are in tension with the values of the younger generation who have assimilated into Australian middle-class life, and this tension is one of the novel's central subjects.
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