Suburban Space and Multicultural Identities in Christos Tsiolkas’s <em>The Slap</em>

Abstract

Since the first publication of Christos Tsiolkas's fourth novel, The Slap, in 2008, it has received great deal of commercial and critical attention both domestically and, in more recent years, internationally. This popularity and rapid subsequent enrollment into the literary mainstream is, it could be argued, in large part due to the accessible prose and book-club compatibility of its core narrative trajectory, which traces topical and thought-provoking depiction of conflicting sets of generational values, domestic politics, and explicit and implicit class conflict, the drama unfolding among an eclectic range of frequently unsympathetic yet believable, identifiable, and compelling characters. This narrative accessibility has been further emphasized by the production of two distinct episodic adaptations for television. The first, successful ABC adaptation in 2011, preserved much of the contemporary flavor and cultural specificity of the original text and starred number of familiar Australian actors including Jonathan LaPaglia, Essie Davis, and Melissa George. A much less successful US remake followed in 2015, featuring American actors in each of the major roles and, somewhat inexplicably, relocating the action from the suburbs to the brownstones of the New York borough of Brooklyn. Despite the geographic differences between the two adaptations, both retain the key narrative thrust of Tsiolkas's novel, charting the consequences of an act of corporal punishment-the titular slap-of misbehaving small boy at social gathering.The publicity for both the novel and its televisual adaptions have tended to emphasize the intergenerational, family-saga aspect of the narrative-the official readinggroup study notes produced by Allen and Unwin, for instance, breathlessly describe The Slap as a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity-all the passions and conflicting beliefs-that family can arouse (2). Despite the focus of these hyperbolic claims-which ironically recall the melodramatic tropes of the vacuous soap opera within the novel, discussed in more detail later-what is equally if not more significant in terms of broader cultural and critical impact than this principal narrative drive (resonant with readers though it may be) is the novel's parallel analysis of the multicultural nature of contemporary Australian society and the perceived success or failure of the motives and practices of that attempted integratory process. The novel's most promising subject for close analysis, therefore, is in fact the ways in which it explores contemporary anxieties around the dissonant discourses of ethnicity and authenticity in the context of Australian multiculturalism. This essay seeks to interrogate the ways in which the novel can be seen to negotiate the politics of this complex issue and its postcolonial implications, by focusing primarily on its deployment of the suburb as its principal geographical setting. The essay will outline how Tsiolkas-himself the son of first-generation Greek immigrants-articulates the contemporary suburban space as liminal zone of spatial and conceptual contact and tension, simultaneously empirical and cognitive; the novel deploys range of epistemological and sociological approaches that construct (and deconstruct) the contemporary Australian suburb as site of intersecting and competing cultural and physical geographies in which power relationships continually shift, gesturing simultaneously toward both the promise of an attainable multicultural identity and the threat of its annihilation.I begin by contextualizing the problematic concept of in Australian literature and culture in general. In Andrew McCann's evocative and apt phrase, suburbia has been neuralgic point in debates about Australian culture and Australian identity since the end of the nineteenth century (vii), that is, since the nation formally came into being when the six colonies and Tasmania federated in 1901. …