It is shaming to stare into the mirror after a late night. Your hair is snarled and your lips are puckered. Your nose glows red. Blotches cover your skin, which is underlain by a lurid translucence. Your eyes are dull, their whites are pallid; and the bags which envelop them are puffed-up. You can’t abide yourself and that is to say nothing of the metaphysical trauma of realising how you live.
Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap is the mirror into which modern society gazes, and be repulsed by what it sees. It begins with a character smacking an errant child at a barbeque and, via the inner lives of eight protagonists, reaches the grander and more repugnant aspects of the contemporary world and multiculturalism. It explores ‘the way we live now’ and largely condemns it.
The Slap has been adopted by book clubs across the world – variously described as riveting, passionate and exhilarating.
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