Helen Garner - Monkey Grip

The prose in this book is generally good. It’s pithy and has the odd memorable observation or phrase. A ‘fingernail moon’, feeling ‘like an old scoured out frying pan’ and the feeling of smack being like ‘warm lead running through your veins’. Unfortunately this is married to some rather less good pretensions. First, what I would call cheesy ejaculations. These are one sentence paragraphs, usually a decent warning for grandiose rubbish, that are seemingly selected for their profundity. If only. A few of the worst offences were:

“A person might not be ashamed to wish for love.” (p9)

“I was afraid of his moods.
I was afraid of my own.
I was afraid of being afraid.” (p32) - why is this italicised? Is it a poem?

“There was a life to be made.” (p75)

“Fear of being loved; fear of not being loved.” (p139)

“I would like to love and yet not to love.” (p203)

As if this kind of thing wasn’t vomit inducing enough, the protagonist is also fond of quoting the I Ching. Of course, this is entirely in keeping with what a bohemian Aussie from the 1970s might well have been like. That still didn’t stop me groaning everytime she attempted to use it to reflect on her life. I thought, ‘have you ever considered the deep and universal truth that a junkie who treats you like shit is a bad choice of lover!?’.


This brings me to my fundamental issue with the book. I did not like Nora and could not empathise with her at all. Her self involvement is truly staggering. The whole book is essentially a stream of consciousness with only one topic covered: her unhealthy and inexplicable obsession with Javo. Other characters never develop much and even central aspects of her own are washed away in the deluge of narcissism. For example, she hardly ever talks about her kids to the point where I spent a hundred odd pages wondering how many she had. It turns out she only has one but doesn’t even mention what she does with her when she goes to Tasmania with Javo. I found it hard to like a character who spent all their time worrying about what an uncaring junkie wants rather than what’s best for their child.


Simultaneously, the self-obsession is mixed with an almost total lack of self-respect. Why have a junkie round your children? Why let him treat you like shit and ignore you in public? She’s not even on smack herself! Love is the excuse given. Either that or the hypnotic nature of Javo’s blue eyes, a fact that’s infuriatingly repeated every 10 pages. While being addicted to heroin is near universally acknowledged to be bad for you, people tend to have a much more positive view of being in love. In this case, the two seem to be as bad as each other!


In spite of not liking the protagonist one bit, this book seems an accurate representation of a deeply troubled woman with very little self-esteem. I wouldn’t recommend it and nor would I say I learned anything much from it because I already knew addicts are emotional black holes and people use love as a justification for incredible stupidity. That said, the prose is good and the presentation feels authentic albeit deeply depressing.