AustLit

Ashton discusses narrative technique and the notion of family in Tsiolkas's The Slap, Cunningham's Bird, Flanagan's Wanting, Leigh's Disquiet, and Lohrey's Vertigo. The review spends most time on The Slap, and Ashton argues that the novel's focus on family should be seen not as a flight from politics, but as 'a flight to the politics of the middle-class family' (93).

'"Sometimes the only way to manage the daily percolating drip of fear, the corrosive dread of debt and humiliation, is to embrace another sort of terror, to put oneself in danger."

'Alice and Louise are sisters united by a distant tragedy - the house fire their brother burnt to death in fourteen years ago. Alice teaches dirt-poor students at a state high school that the government wants to close while she pursues a tumultuouse relationship with a married man. Louse, a habitual liar and recovering heroin addict, has been playing "the danger game" since she was a child, and she can't stop. But when Louise decides to unravel the truth about her twin brother's death, and seeks out the mother that abandoned them, everything changes.' (From the publisher's website.)