The author of The Slap vividly explores his country’s social faultlines
Christos Tsiolkas’s characters live in a dangerous world. In his 2009 bestseller The Slap, a single gesture triggered the meltdown of an entire suburban universe, and in this new collection of two decades’ worth of short stories a wide variety of protagonists discover that their lives are just waiting to be ripped apart. It is as though the now familiar principle of the tipping point has been shifted from global warming to the interior workings of the heart; one word or look in the wrong place or time, and life becomes a catastrophe.
The title story sets the tone. A group of multicultural, metrosexual and conspicuously shiny young 1990s professionals decide to play a party game in which a word pulled from a hat initiates a sequence of personal confessions. Tensions escalate, the confessions become more alarming, and by the end of the evening the hosts, the guests, the narrator and indeed the reader have all been not so much subjected to emotional scrutiny as disembowelled, dismembered and scattered to the four winds.
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