The Slap, by Christopher Tsiolkas

Chirstopher Tsiolkas'sThe Slap just gets better and better until the final pages, which are fantastic! So often I quit reading novels when I get to the ending, because so many books with promising openings lose their momentum about halfway through.

The Slap is worth reading for its simple premise (a man slaps a kid who is not his own at a suburban picnic), and it's structure - it's told from the povs of 8 characters, in 8 sections, and each character's life reverberates with the lingering sting of the slap as marriages, friendships, and partnerships are tested and reevaluated. Each character in The Slap manages to be grippingly interesting, perhaps because each has something they've been hiding, and each must decide what to do with that secret. And there are so many sparkling sentences!

The book takes place in Melbourne, Australia, which resembles Zadie Smith's London in that people of many cultural backgrounds and types now coexist, almost comfortably (but not quite), and as a result, existence is dynamic. Which resembles our world, really.

The most interesting theme in this book is that profound change and growth happen when one has the opportunity to go in a brand-new direction and then, after carefully weighing the options, chooses instead to stick with the life that they already have, a life that, for all its seeming predictability and mundanity and flaws, is nevertheless remarkable.

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