Monkey Grip

Image credit: Text Publishing Company 

This week I am back to reading fiction from my own backyard with one of Australia’s most celebrated and versatile authors: Helen Garner. A writer of novels, screenplays, and non-fiction, Garner can do no wrong - or rather she does everything wrong, and it turns out to be righter than right- and the book I just closed the cover on, Monkey Grip, is a perfect example of this.

Nora lives in a world of sex, drugs, and community: communal households, partners, and possessions. There is love, but there is also a whole mess of sticky emotional navigation that comes with it. When she falls in love with Javo, Nora is pulled into a web of addiction and an emotional rip that pulls her one way and then another in the blink of an eye. As she battles to stay strong during Javo’s unstable dance of loving and leaving, Nora discovers that there are limits to the amount of love that one can give, but also there are so many ways in which relationships can flourish, thrive, and endure.

Depicting young Australian culture in the late 1970s, Monkey Grip is a raw and delightfully rough novel, the equivalent of a painful massage that finally works out that knot in the muscle, or a really hard scrub with loofah that erases that grass stain from your back. Garner is intimate and painful in her writing, delving deep into the character of Nora and putting her innermost emotional workings on display.

When it first came out, the book divided critics as to whether its combination of grittiness and lyrical prose was a match, but nowadays Monkey Grip is considered a masterpiece. Garner aggressively throws all textbook rules of writing out the window and instead expels whatever is pushing the skin at the tips of her fingers, seemingly without rhyme or reason. The book is a character study in the shaping power of environments, subculture, and community; not so much telling a story with an ending or punchline, rather following one woman and her attempts to navigate the emotional minefields of her life. It’s a book about nothing and everything. And the most brilliant thing about it is that a great change happens that you don’t even recognise until the end. Over the course of the book Nora goes on a journey of internal self-discovery and it’s not until the very last pages and reading the thoughts that come into her head regarding situations that she’s been in before that you realise how much she has changed. This pleasant surprise is shared by the protagonist herself, making it all the more satisfying when the cover is closed.

Image credit: Herald Sun

Monkey Grip is one of those books that doesn’t draw you in with its blurb, rather the promise of an uncomfortable depiction of drug addictions and artistic insecurity works a little like a deterrent, but as soon as you start reading and you get completely enveloped in Nora’s brainwaves, there is no escape. It really is like being in a rip, scary at first but you just need to remember to let it carry you to shore… eventually. It’s a captivating and truly hypnotic read.

Author: Helen Garner, 1977

Published: First published by McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1977.