The Slap

While reading this book I felt like a very good person and a very bad person. The plot of The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas, is centred around one act: A man slaps a child at a neighbourhood barbecue.  This book explores how this one act affected the people and the families who witnessed it: marriages were strained, reputations were questioned and some friendships ended while others emerged.  I thought this was a really interesting idea, to have one central plotline and tons of tagents jump off it – at some points the slap wasn’t even mentioned, it just became a constant underlying presence.  The story was actually told through eight different people who witnessed the slap, all of whom have different relationships with the people directly involved, aka: the slappee and the slapper.

I appreciate a format like this, with different character voices, because I have a tendency to become a little ADD when I’m reading a book, it’s hard for me to fully commit.  The first half is the honeymoon stage, I can’t wait to be with it, I think about it all the time, tell all my friends about it, and than the middle comes and the spark is gone.  It becomes more of a task, I’m only spending time with it because I have to, but, secretly, I’m dreaming of the next book I’m going to meet, and possibly already planning a sneak-peek rendezvous.  But reading a book with eight different character viewpoints, and almost eight different plotlines, that problem was solved.  I looked forward to meeting each character.

By the end of  this book though, I, too, wanted to slap the kid – he spit on and kicked an old man for no reason – this makes me a bad person.  But I’m a good person because I would never have actually hit him; my dislike of him would be purely emotional and only acted upon in a passive-aggressive way, a.k.a. talking about him behind his parent’s back.

I liked how this book sparked this duality.  It flirts with the line between discipline and child abuse – this kid was a spoiled brat, who was never disciplined, and if he hadn’t been slapped he most likely would have hit another child with a lacrosse bat, but is it ever right to hit a child?  No.  And as you delve deeper into the issue, where your sympathies lie constantly change.  With each character, something new is added to the plot as they reveal something different about the situation, whether its background information or just their own prejudices and biases.  Automatically, I was on the side of the slapped child and his parents, as it was a very traumatic event, but the more I got to know this kid, the more I understood why people were frustrated with him.  But there are faults on both sides, so throughout the entire novel you’re constantly questioning what is right vs. wrong.  And the characters themselves lead interesting lives on their own.

This was my first book I’ve read by an Australian author and I really enjoyed it, although the language used is far more blunt and abrupt than what I’m used to.  Overall though, it was definitely worth the commitment.

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