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Monkey Grip Hardcover – April 9, 2019
Helen Garner (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Enhance your purchase
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherText Publishing Company
- Publication dateApril 9, 2019
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-101925773159
- ISBN-13978-1925773156
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About the Author
Charlotte Wood is the prizewinning author of five novels and two books of non-fiction, and co-director of The Creativity Clinic. Her most recent novel is The Natural Way of Things.
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Product details
- Publisher : Text Publishing Company (April 9, 2019)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1925773159
- ISBN-13 : 978-1925773156
- Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,405,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,810 in Friendship Fiction (Books)
- #11,493 in Women's Friendship Fiction
- #15,345 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Helen Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong, and was educated there and at Melbourne University. She taught in Victorian secondary schools until 1972, when she was dismissed for answering her students’ questions about sex, and had to start writing journalism for a living.
Her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977, won the 1978 National Book Council Award, and was adapted for film in 1981. Since then she has published novels, short stories, essays, and feature journalism. Her screenplay The Last Days of Chez Nous was filmed in 1990. Garner has won many prizes, among them a Walkley Award for her 1993 article about the murder of two-year-old Daniel Valerio. In 1995 she published The First Stone, a controversial account of a Melbourne University sexual harassment case. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) was a non-fiction study of two murder trials in Canberra.
In 2006 Helen Garner received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel, The Spare Room (2008), won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction and the Barbara Jefferis Award, and has been translated into many languages.
Helen Garner lives in Melbourne.
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Monkey Grip vaguely resembles a European art book, with little in the way of plot, but reverberating with so much evocative imagery and stream-of-consciousness, as well as the political transgressions and offbeat sexuality of Burroughs and other American beat writers. The imagery is beautiful and vividly described, reminiscent of an E.M. Forster novel if it took place in inner-city Australia in the 70s. Perhaps a more accurate comparison would be Jack Kerouac, who captured a generation in America with his book On The Road, in the same way Garner captured a generation in Australia: thirty-somethings living in inner-city Melbourne, with its share-houses, lively art scene, and burgeoning feminist ideals about open relationships, new ways of loving, and living. Both books have become cultural touchstones and a time-capsuel for their respective countries.
Those seeking a book with a formulaic plot, with a clear beginning, middle and end will be disappointed. A common, but tiresome and baseless complaint levelled at this book is that it is "thin on plot". I wonder why people become so uncomfortable when they read a book that doesn't appease their desire for conventional narrative. People looking for an obvious beginning/middle/end should scope out a romance paperback and leave the subversive Helen Garner, with her challenging and gritty depiction of love in the mid 70s alone. Still, I'm not above recommending this to anybody with a healthy curiosity, even if it's not their style. The wording, dialogue and language are rewarding, and I think even the detractors can recognise that, and Garner brings her characters to life in very colourful ways. Nora, in her indecisiveness, and her neurotic desperation for Javo (which brilliantly parallels his neurotic addiction for a heroin hit), will be recognisable to a lot of readers. At one point, Nora says...
"Smack habit! Love habit! What's the difference? They can both kill you."
I think I'll leave it at that.
Nora wanders in and out of bed with Javo, looks after her daughter Gracie, swims in the Fitzroy pool and rides her bike all over inner Melbourne. But no matter how badly Javo behaves, stealing money from flatmates to fund his addiction, disappearing for months at a time, something always draws them back together, ‘and the harder they pull away from each other, the tighter the monkey grip’.
The story is almost plotless, as the characters wander from one house, one party, one sexual encounter, to the next. One of the criticisms levelled at it at the time was that Garner had simply published her diaries. Later she admitted that much of the story had come from her diaries, which makes this book an incredible expose of her psyche at that time, but it doesn’t read like a diary, its better than that. The minutae of everyday life that Garner portrays is really mesmerising and one of the great strengths of her writing, for me at least. I love her casual way with dialogue and how resolutely Australian everyone sounds. They go out the back to the dunny, they talk about people ‘giving them the s***’, and tell people to ‘get stuffed’.
No wonder Australians identified with such local literature, which until then was almost non-existent.
I suppose what I admire most about Garner’s skill is her ability to deliver a line of dialogue with some internal discourse attached to it, that perfectly conveys how the character is feeling in so few words. I just love the minimalism of it. One of the best lines for me is when Nora decides to move out from the house she shares with her friend Rita, and the man she reluctantly thinks of as her current squeeze, asks whether she feels guilty about leaving Rita and her daughter behind.
‘If you can do it and not feel guilty about it, that’s really good. I’ve never done it, that’s all,’ he says.
‘Done what?’ Nora asks.
‘Walked out on someone who needed me.’
And then Garner, sums up just how this affects Nora in just 12 perfect words, and no more:
A great rush of distress and its protective accompaniment, anger, filled me.
It may not seem like the most amazing line of prose, but to me its just perfect. I could read her all day.
The concept of rebelling against monogamy is also interesting – when one of the women says the one thing you can’t do is take another woman’s man, they all glare at her as if she’s just suggested dropping the atomic bomb, and Nora wonders if they think that, then what have they ‘all been agonising about all this time?’ The conversation perfectly captures the problem with open relationships – its a good idea, but in reality, jealousy, possessiveness and love intrude and cause these women to be hurt, multiple times over, as they try to hide their pain from their men and each other.
But eventually Nora and Javo’s dance around each other has to come to a head, and there’s a climax of sorts, but this isn’t the book to read if you need a classical plot and deft structure. Just read it to revel in the words, and the images, and the precise, evocative dialogue.
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