Christos Tsiolkas

So often, the language used to discuss Australian literature is that of anxiety. A.A. Phillips’s ‘cultural cringe’, coined in 1950, is never far from the critical surface as readers and commentators grapple with questions of national and literary identity. The report of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award’s judges offers one such example ...

As I turned the last pages of Christos Tsiolkas’ new novel The Jesus Man, the news broke of the killings at Columbine High School. I had just noted that the novel reminded me of some feminist art from the 1970s in which a woman exhibited a series of used Modess, and that The Jesus Man was the literary and male equivalent – a series of used condoms. The Jesus Man will always exist between these two images for me. Tsiolkas makes a genuine effort to explore adolescent male sexuality and its connection to pornography and violence and how these relate to contemporary media and technologies, important issues certainly.

How do you give a plot description of this book without entering into the very language that it problematises? Ari is young, unemployed, Greek and gay ... Or Ari is a poofter wog, a slut, a conscientious objector from the workforce ...