![]() ![]() ![]() Set in the suburbs, it centres on a close-knit, affluent community made up of predominantly second-generation Greek Australians, but also including white Australians, descendants of Aborigines and ethnic Indians. The Slap is a long way from being an Australian version of Ian McEwan's Saturday. I don't mean to conjure up the familiar British stereotypes. I use the phrase "middle class" here advisedly. Its zeitgeist-capturing qualities can be summed up in a single sentence: more than any other recent work of fiction, it is a novel about the failings of middle-class life – and one that points to wider concerns about the durability of liberal values in a multicultural society. But the fascination that The Slap has engendered is about more than sales, hype or even its frankly dubious literary merits. The book has sold extremely well (nearly 40,000 copies so far), earned glowing reviews and has been longlisted for this year's Booker prize. Over the past couple of months, you will have been hard pressed not to have noticed the buzz surrounding Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, a novel about the fissures that result from a man striking somebody else's child at a Melbourne barbecue. ![]() But sometimes the phenomenon is more complex, having to do with expressing a public mood or hitting some kind of cultural pressure point. Often, this is simply a question of sales. O ccasionally, a novel bursts from the confines of the literary pages and becomes a subject of more general interest. ![]()
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