Delivering a Punch

When his 1995 debut novel Loaded was a critical and commercial hit, Christos Tsiolkas was celebrated as a key voice from the next generation of Australian novelists. In the intervening years, with novels The Jesus Man(1999) and Dead Europe (2005) and theatre including Non Parlo di Salo (2005) he continued to shock, discomfit and dazzle in equal measure. His latest novel The Slap follows eight inner-city Melbournians through the shockwaves that ensue after one of them disciplines another’s child. It was one of the bestselling, best-received novels of last year and has already won the South-East Asia and Pacific region’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for 2009 and been long-listed for the Miles Franklin Award. In seeming contrast to the unflinching harshness of some of his literary creations, at the Melbourne Trades Hall launch of The Slap he was introduced as one of the loveliest men in Australian publishing. Triple R’s Michael Williams spoke to him at length and finds that description inadequate.

Michael Williams: When Loaded came out, a great deal of the commentary surrounding it focused on identity politics. The emphasis was on whether your protagonist, Ari, defined himself chiefly through his sexuality or his race. While many of the same themes can be followed through your work, arguably The Slap’s key moments of identity concern age and class. Would you agree with that and does it reflect a shift in your attitudes?

Christos Tsiolkas: I think it does reflect a shift in my attitudes. Not that what formed my interest—immersion even—in identity politics has disappeared. Questions of sexuality, cultural and racial identity are still important to me. But I think that shift represents one thing: I’ve gotten older. My relationship with older members of my family is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, and the children in my life are now teenagers and young adults. As for class, especially over the period of Howard, its transformation seemed so under-debated, so under-thought-out. It sort of disappeared, I thought, from the intellectual and public landscape of Australian culture. And it just seemed to me that class is the great unspoken theme underlying what’s occurring.

MW: You bring it up really powerfully in this and it’s through the lens of things such as talking about where characters’ kids are going to go to school. That seems to me to be the very Australian class conversation that’s happening …

CT: It is actually quite incredible. We have the highest rate of private school education in the OECD. What we’ve done to the education system is one of the great cultural failures of Australia. And we will see that in hindsight. We will see that because we’ve had every opportunity to create something much more, something better.

I didn’t set out to be explicit about the politics in this book. But while I was working on the final edits of The Slap, I read George Megalogenis’s book The Longest Decade. And I think that’s one book that is really saying some interesting things about the nature of Australian culture, and what has happened over the last fifteen or twenty years. One point he makes is that almost 30 per cent of the population has disappeared from political representation, from media representation, from cultural representation, and it doesn’t matter whether we have a Labor or Liberal government. That’s almost like an underclass that we can refer to and talk about if we’re interested but actually know nothing about. It feels like a complete economic apartheid. Australian suburban middle-class culture is such a wide proportion of the population and the reality of the aspirational class is that it does look Wog, it does look Asian as much as it looks Irish and Anglo and that’s really fascinating. Maybe I should read more widely, but I’m not aware of [that diversity] being represented in our literature or in our films or television.

MW: There’s an extent to which the contemporary urban Australian experience of any class is fairly underrepresented in our literature and our arts. Apart from genre stuff where its acceptable, there seems to be an argument that Australian Literature has to be historical, it has to be rural, it has to be a particular kind of national motif.

CT: It has to be named after a tree!

MW: Absolutely! One thing that makes your writing stand out is the way in which it speaks to the contemporary Australian experience.

CT: Look, I think that reluctance to talk about contemporary Australia comes from an artistic class with a reluctance to actually see ourselves as connected to this suburbia. You know there’s a rich vein to mine about our reluctance to be suburban and that antipathy to the reality of suburban life in Australia. I think there’s been a turn away from realism in our writing as well, and I’m not sure why that is. I think there’s almost a sense over the last twenty years of going for the grand themes; that if you did talk about the domestic, if you did talk about the contemporary urban, that somehow you were not as good a writer. The important writers were those dealing with the Big Themes.

Dead Europe came out of that kind of questioning of the role of the writer in this culture. And The Slap was a reaction to the work I did in Dead Europe. It was meant to be a much lighter and a much smaller book. I’d started to inhabit Isaac and the characters in Dead Europe and it was a really difficult book to write. Sometimes I still get queasy about that novel. When I started it I didn’t realise how immersed I was going to be in that world. And that by revealing something about anti-Semitism, which I knew was an important project to do, I think I was unaware of how consumed I would become by those politics and by that racism.

That’s actually how I first started working on The Slap: Dead Europe had, quite honestly, left me exhausted. I can only use that word. And I said ‘I’m gonna actually stop working on it.’ It almost became one of my ‘filed in the back of the drawer’ books. And so the beginning of The Slap felt like a holiday. It was just to get into the joy of writing again. But we’re all prey to the insecurities and neuroses and self-obsessions and narcissism that come with this craft. I thought: Am I going to get hammered for writing a domestic novel? But I also think that there’s something in giving a voice to the contemporary experience that is important to do. Not only important, exciting. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question at all.

MW: I am interested in the way you talk about your books as almost being on some kind of continuum … the way in which one leads to the other. Is there some kind of inevitable progression?

CT: I don’t know if it is conscious. I think we do it in our lives all the time: through hindsight you can create a history that you can talk about in an interview. But no, I didn’t feel consciously there was a progression from Loaded to Jesus Man to Dead Europe to The Slap. In hindsight, though, thinking about myself as a writer and as a human in relationship to the work, the first three novels feel like a trilogy. They were written at a time when I was really confused and I was really disappointed and heartbroken about the failure of politics and the failure of a radical revolutionary politics. To put it bluntly, it’s almost like you can read them as a trilogy about the loss of faith: from the young boy at the centre of Loaded to the world of family in Jesus Man and then the whole of European history.

MW: How does the appearance of Ari, the protagonist of Loaded, fit into that idea in The Slap?

CT: There is something about Ari: he’s an alter-ego in the classic sense; a fictional character that can speak to some parts of myself that have no other terrain to find a voice. He’s an idealisation and he’s a provocation. So when I was thinking of The Slap, because it’s set in my contemporary world, I wondered what it would be like if Ari were one of those characters. Two things happened. He didn’t actually quite suit the world of The Slap, but much more importantly I started writing a chapter devoted to him and The Slap disappeared. Aisha and Hector, everyone disappeared. Because Ari is not connected to that world so the novel became something else.

I have since started some work on a narrative for Ari and it’s enjoyable. The thing is, Ari makes me feel my age with immense force. Sometimes when you go back and read your work you’re actually embarrassed. You find it really difficult because you’re so conscious and you can be your worst critic. So I started this process of reading Loaded again and you know I just thought: Oh my God, I’m not that man at all. And that’s obviously bullshit, I am that man. But it’s such a youthful voice. I’m forty-three now, so I’m not past it, but it’s a very youthful voice. And something has transformed in my writing I think through the process of Dead Europe and The Slap.

MW: Given that sexuality is a less central point of identity in The Slap than it was in, say, Loaded, how do you think it has particular bearing on your characters?

CT: Loaded was a first-person narrative driven by Ari’s voice. For Ari, the sex he had and his refusal to name or limit his sexuality was an existential defiance grounded on fucking. There is nothing terribly original in that. I was very influenced by the works of John Rechy, the US gay writer who also worked as a prostitute, and for whom sex was the battleground for liberation. I was also greatly influenced by Camus, Genet, that generation of French writers: that’s why I now, in hindsight, identify Ari’s stance as ‘existential’. I wanted to give voice to how frustrating, how tortuous the straightjacket of conforming sexuality and gender could be, regardless of whether the norms applied were patriarchal or feminist, heterosexual or gay. These confusions and conflict had been in my head (and experienced within my own body) for such a long time that finding Ari’s voice was a release, a purge.

Given that The Slap is written across eight different voices, it does not have that libidinal energy. That reflects the differences of gender, experience, age and culture. I think sexuality informs all the characters at different points, that one of the ways I wanted to explore each character was by placing them in sexual scenarios, going inside their heads to explore their attitudes to their partners or to their fantasies; but there is going to be a different expression of sexuality between Manolis, who is realising that his sexual life is all but over, and Richie, who’s not sure yet how to deal with a sexual future.

Actually, the more I think about it the more I wonder if sexuality is not a key marker of identity in the novel. I’ve been fascinated by the strong, outraged reactions to the morality of the characters’ sexual lives, the pronounced distaste for the adultery in the novel. I’m not sure I’m the person to reflect on this but there seems to be something about the sex that ‘distresses’ many readers about the novel. I wonder if it is something to do with the how the ‘urgency’ of sex intrudes into the domestic landscape of the novel.

MW: I felt that many of the sexual interactions in the book seem infused with an undercurrent of violence, or at least unhappiness. Do you agree with this and, if so, why do you think that is?

CT: The area of sex has always struck me as fraught in that it does lay us bare, in all senses. The sublime pleasure of sex, for me at least, cannot be detached from the terror of abandonment or betrayal or rejection. No doubt the constraint of gender plays its part in this—the sense I have that masculinity is not a given but something to ‘achieve’. I wish I could be more articulate—all I can say is that it has been my battle, a source of my inspiration, a never-settled question: what is it to be a man? The sense of having to constantly look over one’s shoulder and at the same time to constantly ensure that one is keeping anger/violence/terror at bay is how I view the experience (certainly not all) of masculinity.

Many years ago another writer said of me that I was caught in a ‘Middle Eastern’ paradox of gender, a statement that made me bristle at the time, but which I now think is both provocative and perceptive. I think the term ‘Middle Eastern’ was lazy: my heritage is Orthodox Christian and I think he was referring to this. Since working on Dead Europe I have become fascinated by the world of Eastern Orthodoxy, how it has been ‘forgotten’ by the West (so that we are puzzled when it ‘returns’, as it did with the collapse of Communism). I think I have an understanding of sexuality and gender which is marked by cultural history, both Australian and Balkan. I find it hardest when people express their animosity to Harry as a character in the book (and in contrast am most keenly interested when a reader tells me they like Harry). I wish I could separate the association I have of sex with aggression, but I know it as part of myself and I suspect it is part of many of our sexual personae. Are we always to be held accountable for the actions of the past? I think it is from the minutiae of this question, grounded in my experience of sex and masculinity, that a whole politics emerges in my writing where I am loath to separate the world into categories of good and evil (I have been at my worst when I have succumbed to such distinctions).

MW: How do you think about family differently now compared to when you were writing something like Jesus Man in particular?

CT: There was a necessary rebellion for me against family, which was leaving home, cutting my roots for a while. In a way it reflected a rebellion that occurred in feminism and gay politics as well I think that was equally necessary. But over time I’ve learnt that the rapprochement is also necessary. One of the ways I’ve learnt it is through seeing what happens when my friends and my peers start having children. (Or otherwise protecting and mentoring and looking after children.) So you’ve seen the relationships and you’ve seen the tensions and you’ve seen the arguments and you’ve seen their necessary rebellion as well. And it gives you a moment of reflection on your own relationship to that past.

There is an immense debt I think I have—and my brother has—to my parents. This is not about a romanticisation. It’s just a reality. This is just about looking at their incredibly hard, difficult lives; there is nothing that has happened to me that can compare to it. They came from humble, poor backgrounds. My mum was fortunate enough to finish primary school, my dad only had two years of education. They worked incredibly hard in the factories in this country. They educated me. No matter how difficult the choices I made, no matter how removed from their world I became they never let go of me. Their love was unconditional, truly unconditional. And so that debt now resonates strongly with me. Without that relationship, without that support, I could’ve easily floundered in so many ways. Family is huge for me and there’s a lot I could say about that.

MW: I ask because there’s that definite shift in your work. In Jesus Man and Loaded there’s a sense of family as something with expectations of you, a sense of your characters feeling oppressed by their families to a certain extent. In contrast, The Slap is partly about the family that we build and the community as family. It’s a much more benevolent depiction.

CT: I just want to say, the danger with that kind of like ‘feel the love’ talk, is that when I talk about necessary rebellion or rejection, I do mean that. Because I think that there are things that I learnt about the family through my engagement with feminism and radical gay politics that I think are true. Really ugly things happen in families—really terrible things—and there are definitions of family that are so rigid and hierarchical that they are suffocating. And so the project of creating alternatives to family and alternative kinds of families is really important to me.

MW: One of the real strengths of the book is the way you move away from that hierarchical model of the nuclear family and explore newer family models where aunts and uncles and friends all become parenting figures. But The Slap also punctures that notion. It says: ‘It’s all well and good to talk about us being all one big extended family but what happens when there’s a need for a moment of discipline’ or ‘What happens when you don’t have the hierarchy and the structure?’ How well does it stand up in a position of conflict?

CT: The reason I’m hesitating about an answer to that is because that’s precisely what the novel is about. It’s a series of questions being posed by the narrative and the choices that these characters make about questions of discipline, about questions of trust, about questions of care. And I, as Christos Tsiolkas the man, have no set answers to those questions. I do, however, have really firm opinions. That’s the process of engagement that I want readers to have. I want them to start responding to those questions, independent of what I think.

MW: In many respects The Slap is a harsh book. I’m interested in how actively some reviewers have expressed a love of the book coupled with a dislike of the characters. Harry, Gary and Rosie, for example, are all very believable, very familiar, but not terribly sympathetic. Do you have a lot of love for your characters?

CT: They are the three characters that I feel if I was to meet them in real life I’d probably feel the most disconnection from. That’s partly from experience; there is a ruthlessness to Harry that I find frightening and a selfishness, if not self-obsession, in Gary and Rosie that’s not as much frightening as it is just really tiring.

I do like all of them and I’m actually feeling a bit protective about Rosie at the moment because being involved with an alcoholic is no easy thing. So I do, as much as you can talk about it as a writer, I do feel the need to protect her from some of the anger that seems to be arising about her as a character. And I really hope it’s never totally cut and dried. I mean, Harry is probably the most despicable in terms of what he does in the book. And he, more than any other character, represents Howard’s aspirational class. But Harry is, I think, a good father. I think that contradiction is possible. And real.

MW: Just going back to Rosie for a second, how much do you think the reaction to her as a character comes from that classic place of people judging mothers?

CT: I think it comes completely from that, to be honest. Because she’s involved in a stage of mothering where the child is developing, so the decisions you’re making are going to have an effect for the rest of their lives. One thing you notice as someone who isn’t a parent is that one of the hardest things to do is to tap your friend on the shoulder and say, ‘I’m not sure about what you’re doing with your child here.’ That is a taboo. That is very difficult to do. Given how angry I’ve seen parents become about the fact that someone dares have an opinion about how they are raising their children, I have been shocked at how ready they then are to turn around and judge new parents and their choices. And I think whatever is at work there, whatever our confusion as a culture about something called parenting, gets expressed in some of the antagonisms towards Rosie.

This is not a book about what is the fucking correct length of time to breastfeed, right? That’s not the point of the book. I think there is something damaged in Rosie’s relationship to Hugo that comes from her own relationship and family history. She’s had the opposite trajectory to Harry. She knows that she can fall through the cracks of this culture.

MW: How did you find writing sex scenes from a female perspective? What kind of response have you had from women to this?

CT: There are three women I thank in the acknowledgments to The Slap: Jessica Migotto, Angela Savage and Jeana Vithoulkas. For the last few years I have met regularly with all three writers and they all were influential in commenting on individual chapters and drafts of the novel. Conversations would range from the ways women use the word ‘cunt’ to the physical differences in the experience of orgasm between women and men. At Allen & Unwin, Jane Palfreyman as publisher and editor, and Joanne Holliman and Alexandra Nahlous as editors, were also pivotal at slapping my wrist when I fucked up in accurately describing the experiences of women. Alex, for example, reminded me very gently that breasts were a real focus of heterosexual fucking.

Apart from that, all I can say is that friendships with women have been pivotal in my life. After the first draft of the novel, I realised that the friendship between Aisha, Anouk and Rosie was central to the novel and in redrafting it I wanted to concentrate on that friendship, its history and its conflicts. Writing from the female experience, hence, proved easier than I thought it would be.

I think I also owe thanks to my theatrical experience, working with actors. By observing their art and craft I have learnt something of how to inhabit ‘characters’, of how to trust a fluidity in experience. In writing The Slap I would get to my feet and, remembering working with actors, physically try to become Connie or Aisha or Manolis. I would try to think through and ‘act’ how a forty-year-old woman’s body would be or an old man’s body react. I wish I could remember who said it, but I remember reading that to be a truly good writer one must ‘write as a bisexual regardless of your sexuality’. I think that’s very true.

Female readers have generally been positive about the female characters, or at least positive about my rendition of them. It is my male characters I think that have proven more difficult. I think—and I know this is a huge generalisation that might see me get clobbered over the head—but I wonder if there is a dissatisfaction with the non-romantic nature of the men and of the marriages.

MW: I know it’s probably best not to read other people their writing but one passage in the book seemed of particular importance to me:

I don’t know … if you’ve been spending any time with teenagers, but I’m fascinated by them and encouraged by them. I don’t feel the same way about our generation at all. Not that I wish to romanticise today’s teenagers; they’re cruel but they’re not hypocrites and unlike us they do not pretend to know more than they do. Or wish to speak on behalf of anyone but themselves.

Is that the most pure distillation of your own views in the book?

CT: Yeah, that’s very well put. It is probably the clearest distillation of what I think. Of where my hope lies. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that I’m an indulgent uncle. Let’s be honest, there is that! All of us who do feel part of something called the Left have had to deal with an immense failure of a utopian vision and a responsibility of what was done in the name of those visions. It’s only through experience that people get an insight. So the way you and I are going to talk, and do talk, to the young people in our life is going to be informed by that knowledge. And I do think that Connie and Richie are kind of protected. If I’d actually concentrated on two kids who came firmly from that 30 per cent who have disappeared from culture, it would have been a completely different book because there’s not a lot of optimism to be seen there.

MW: One of the most impressive things about The Slap is its poly-vocal qualities. At the other end of the spectrum from the optimism of your teenage characters is [Hector’s father] Manolis. It’s a chapter full of disappointment and grief: is that how you view that generation’s experience?

CT: It could be just these characters, but I never believe it when people do that whole ‘I’ve got no regrets’ thing. You know, regrets are real. Regrets happen because we do make bad choices or mistakes. People like Manolis and Koula come from a sheltered, fraught world and they raised children, in a time where everything that they were told about family and public space and society got trashed by what their children did and they see that around them. The number of old friends of my mum who have said, ‘Of course Christos, if I knew what I know now about women’s choices, about the fact that marriage was not the only option available to me, I would have a different life.’ And I think that was almost a kind of untold story. There was a generation of migrant women who did go through a deep crisis, particularly once their children grew up. And the children might have all been doing the right thing but you still saw that depression take form. I think that was about regret. And I think there was something equivalent that happened with men as well. Manolis represents some of that. He’s also a character that embodies some of that debt that I was talking about to my parents. My big hope is that, of all my books, this one is translated into Greek because this is the one I really want Mum and Dad to read.

When I was in the middle of writing this book there was one particular incident I saw that played on my mind. I was on this train, the Epping line, and for some reason I had to get into the city—I usually don’t go in peak hour. Anyway, I caught it at Bell station near my place and as soon as I got into the carriage I noticed these high school kids. I knew that something was up because there was a group of them near the door and they were swearing and acting up and being quite aggressive. Sitting below them, hunched up in deep humiliation, was this elderly woman. She must have been in her late sixties or seventies, and she was obviously affected by the language and I thought: Oh come on. I’m the last person in the freakin’ world who is gonna talk to you about swearing, but show some respect.

So eventually I did lean over to one of the boys—they would’ve been fifteen or sixteen—and I said something along the lines of ‘Come on, mate. Just keep it down. Some people don’t wanna hear this language.’ The worst thing I could’ve done. The worst thing. They just turned on me and amped it up. Everyone else was equally embarrassed and you could feel that they were actually on my side but they were too scared to say anything. And it wasn’t only about fear, it was that we didn’t know how to say it. By the end of it I actually got off early I was shaking so much. All I really wanted to do was fucking bash those kids. Talk about wanting to deliver a slap: I wanted to deliver a punch.

I got off and … the anger dissipated. What it was replaced with was this really huge sadness. How do you not learn that? How do you not learn that in front of an elder you show respect? That’s all. How did that not get communicated to you? What does that mean about the life you came from and the relationship between you and your parents?

Manolis became the voice where I could express something about that because, whatever the failures of that traditional culture, he comes from a world that understands completely responsibility to community. So he felt like the perfect person to be able to speak it. He’s part of that debt that I feel to Mum and Dad.

MW: Lastly, your use of ‘slap’ rather than ‘smack’ feels like a deliberate choice to place Harry’s act in the adult sphere. Was that distinction something you were aiming for?

CT: It was never going to be ‘The Smack’. It was always going to be The Slap because a slap does mean something: it’s a violent act that can happen between adults as well as between an adult and a child. A smack—like when [Robbie’s mother] Tracie says ‘I smacked you’ in the book—is something that sounds quite normal. That said, it’s not a book about me taking a position on whether a kid should be hit or not. I think one of the things about being an adult is realising that violence is both something that is inherent in you but also something that has to be controlled. Growing up is about that mastering and disciplining of self, and I think how you control yourself as a communal and social animal and as part of a family or in a relationship is crucial as well. Violence is not necessarily bashing or hitting or what happens at 2.30 a.m. outside a strip joint in Melbourne. Violence is about how you yell at a neighbour or yell at someone in a shop. It’s about how you relate to the individuals who come into your path as part of your daily existence. And in that way The Slap is full of submerged violence, all the way through.