I was deep into the writing of this book when Barracuda was published. The appearance of that novel consolidated what was, for me at least, an unexpected change in the trajectory of Tsiolkas's career. We have seen how emphatically the early part of Tsiolkas's career oriented to the figure of Pasolini and the problem of imagining constituencies and ways of being not yet incorporated into the circuits of capitalism and neoliberal desire. For both Pasolini and Tsiolkas, the possibility of remaining outside these circuits produced a visceral intensity that would also, ultimately, be the basis upon which atomized subjects are assimilated into the hedonism of consumer society and global capitalism. In Tsiolkas's first three novels this impasse is reproduced with increasing degrees of urgency until, finally, Isaac Raftis in Dead Europe confronts the complete breakdown of his character at the moment that he becomes the monstrous embodiment of a sexualized sovereignty that concentrates alienated, egotistical and violently exploitative drives. The arc that connects Loaded, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe is a despairing one. These novels constitute Tsiolkas's trilogy of negation, or of annihilation. They explore and confront the limits of a model of subjectivity that promises transgression only to find itself back at the center of the very system it hoped to negate and destroy. It is for this reason that life for Tommy and Isaac becomes quite literally intolerable.

The Slap, of course, is a very different kind of novel, but not one that offers any clear path beyond the pessimism of the early texts. The promise of multiculturalism is ultimately hollowed out by the aspirational, middle-class structures in which it appears. It is a novel in which the sheer facticity of the everyday wins out and marginalizes any serious or sustained resistance to it. That Tsiolkas himself has had to explicate the political backdrop of the novel so insistently reflects the fact that, without the furious negativity of the earlier texts, The Slap is, politically speaking, a fairly nebulous sort of undertaking. Its realism, we could say, embodies an attenuation of its political engagement. Barracuda, however, feels quite different. Because of the clarity with which it embraces the Bildungsroman form, it also offers a way beyond both negativity and the tyranny of the everyday.