Christos Tsiolkas

Ari is nineteen, Greek, gay, unemployed, looking for something - anything - to take him away from his aimless existence in suburban Melbourne. Torn between the traditional Greek world of his parents and friends and the alluring, destructive world of clubs and drugs and anonymous sex, all Ari can do is ease his pain in the only way he knows how. Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap became an international bestseller and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009. This is his sensational first novel.

Loaded

Sam O'Leary

Can anyone else make injecting speed seem so cool?

Jessica Smith

I really want to give this two and a half… I liked it, but it felt like a guilty pleasure. It's a novel about alienation, about Ari, an unemployed nineteen-year-old boy who takes drugs and has unhealthy, anonymous, vicious sex as a way of life. Tsiolkas injects some politics into the tale – it reminded me a bit of a better, Melburnian version of Less Than Zero – but Ari himself hates the world, states at one point that he wants to destroy it all in a nuclear holocaust.

So I don't know. On one level it was a fun read, but on the other… I felt that the political tangents didn't really "fit" with the rest of Ari's drug-fuelled evening, like it was too heavy-handed. There's a lot of "Melburnia", but unlike with The Slap I don't think Tsiolkas got all his facts right; for example, he had Ari insist that Greek migrants settled here only north of the river, even though Oakleigh in the south-eastern suburbs is the hub of the Greek community. He also listed Bentleigh as a leafy eastern suburb, up there with Balwyn and Boronia, when it's actually just west of Oakleigh and was for a long time a working-class area… populated by people who worked in the factories in Oakleigh (and a little further afield, like in Moorabbin and such).

I guess it kind of bugged me that this was a city I almost recognised, but not quite. Its setting in time had a similar effect – having been published in 1995, it's stuck in that limbo where it's not quite old enough to be considered a representation of a historical period, but old enough that it's quite dated. Ari buys two drinks at a club and pays $5 for them. He has to call people at their homes on Saturday afternoon to plan where he'll bump into them at 1:30am. That kind of thing!

But like I said, overall, it was fun. Since I can't give it two and a half, I'll round up to three for that.

Loaded

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