Christos Tsiolkas - The Jesus Man

'Apathetic literature', or novels that concern the apparent meaningless of life, are not new. Nor are they rare. It seems that, particularly following World War I, authors began to grapple in earnest with the idea that their lives may have no grand meaning. Camus and Sartre gave an early boost to existentialism, it is unfortunate that today, it seems that any old writer can put pen to paper and produce a book about characters who don't know what their lives mean and don't care much about anything. Christos Tsiolkas' novel, The Jesus Man, is such a novel. It is filled with self-loathing, pointlessly wandering characters who don't know, don't care, don't love and don't like.

The novel is told through a variety of perspectives, almost all of which centre around the Stefano's, a family of second generation Greek immigrants in Melbourne, Australia. The three brothers - Dom, Tommy and Lou - share a grand pathos towards life, though Dom (incidentally the character with whom we spend the least amount of time) seems to have his at least some idea about his future.

The first half, we spend with Tommy. He is fat, lazy and about to lose his job. His girlfriend, Chinese Soo-Ling, puts up with his behaviour, though she doesn't like it. Tommy spends his time wandering from one X-rated movie store to another, purchasing pornography and indulging himself in furious sessions that leave him disgusted with himself, but aching for more.

The second half deals with Lou, the youngest Stefano brother. He is (not) dealing with Tommy's bizarre murder-suicide, spiraling into a haze of random sex, drugs and alcohol.

And that's the plot. To say that it is tiresome to read about an unappealing character visiting pornography houses and prostitutes for 400 pages, is hardly an exaggeration. When Tommy or Lou aren't indulging in pornography, they are thinking about sex - usually violence and rape based. When they aren't breezing about Melbourne, they are taking drugs. It's a tiresome, tiresome world to which we are introduced, and there aren't any redeeming qualities.

In the Jesus Man, everyone is angry with each other, and themselves. Everyone is bored with life, ranging from mildly suicidal to actually killing themselves on the page. Nobody is ever happy, there are hardly any smiles to speak of. One could argue that Tsiolkas is making a statement about the meaningless of life, but that is giving him far too much credit. It is easy to have characters wander around moaning about their lives - easy and cheap and boring. As readers, we must demand something more. Tsiolkas is lazy, he's writing sophomoric angst, not existential philosophy.

'Tommy, walking past, was seized with a strong desire to smash his foot into the child's wet face. He walked out, the air was warm. He had one thought. Pornography.' This is Tommy, thinking about his life. It's not unjust to say that extrapolating these sentences out would explain the entire novel. Yes, there are hints of racial discord, of the difficulties that immigrants face when building a new life in an unfamiliar country, but for every sentence devoted to race, there are twenty focused upon pornography, drugs and violence.

One of the worst stunts Tsiolkas pulls is to be dishonest with his readers. Towards the end, we read the journal entries of a character that Lou had a crush on. This section lasts maybe twenty pages, and is similar to everything else - endless drugs, endless sex, endless self loathing. Tsiolkas cheats by revealing casually that the journal writer is dead. Why did we read his journal then? Ah, yes, to create a false emotional bond. If the journal wasn't in the novel, we wouldn't have cared about his death. But it was, so our emotions are tweaked. But it's all false - Tsiolkas is playing with us, he's tricking us into feeling.

Dialogue is marked using hyphens, but only for the opening. It is similar to Joyce's Ulysses, or all of William Gaddis' work. Unfortunately, while the dialogue trick worked there, it does not for Tsiolkas. Unmarked dialogue has the ability to flow, to run like a stream along the page, moving everything forward without the interruption of petty punctuation, but when it fails, everything becomes confused and muddled. Because Tsiolkas has a first-person narrator, it's very difficult to tell what is dialogue and what is thought. During lengthy conversations, this can become very confusing. A better author manages to work around this limitation. Tsiolkas does not.

'Most people, I'm discovering this, most people are ignorant: wilfully ignorant, wilfully stupid.' Tsiolkas very rarely has his characters make comments that approach any depth at all: the above sentence is indicative of the type of faux-philosophising and social commentary that runs through the novel. The characters bemoan that they have nothing to say, and it's true, they don't. Yet we are forced to spend nearly 400 pages of this nothing, and it wears. It grates. It's ultimately wearying, and very disappointing. Nihilistic and existentialist literature has a place, but third-rate complaining does not. The Jesus Man falls into the pile of literature that tried, but failed, to say something important. There's nothing here. Stay away.

Links

Wikipedia - Author
Amazon

Random House Publicity Page

Categories

Australian Authors