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Helen Garner

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Monkey Grip: A Novel Hardcover – February 20, 2024

by Helen Garner (Author), Lauren Groff (Foreword)

3.7 493 ratings

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The novel that launched the career of one of Australia’s greatest writers, following the doomed infatuations of a young, single mother, enthralled by the excesses of Melbourne's late-70s counterculture

The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of Australian life, often drawn from the pages of her own journals and diaries. Now, in a newly available US edition, comes the disruptive debut that established Garner's masterful and quietly radical literary voice.

Set in Australia in the late 1970s, Monkey Grip follows single mother and writer Nora as she navigates the tumultuous cityscape of Melbourne’s bohemian underground, often with her young daughter Gracie in tow. When Nora falls in love with the flighty Javo, she becomes snared in the web of his addiction. And as their tenuous relationship disintegrates, Nora struggles to wean herself off a love that feels impossible to live without.

When it first published in 1977, Monkey Grip was both a sensation and a lightning rod. While some critics praised the upstart Garner for her craft, many scorned her gritty depictions of the human body and all its muck, her frankness about sex and drugs and the mess of motherhood, and her unabashed use of her own life as inspiration. Today, such criticism feels old-fashioned and glaringly gendered, and Monkey Grip is considered a modern masterpiece.

A seminal novel of Australia’s turbulent 1970s and all it entailed—communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex—Monkey Grip now makes its long-overdue American debut.

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pantheon
Publication date

February 20, 2024
Dimensions

6.34 x 1.22 x 9.54 inches
ISBN-10

0553387456
ISBN-13

978-0553387452
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Acclaimed Australian writer Garner’s achingly poignant portrait of a young woman and the drug addict she loves rings with an authenticity that is, by turns, frustrating and sweet...In buoyant and vivid prose, Garner evokes the lies, deceptions, delusions, and hope that come with a life always lived on the edge of despair or delight."—Booklist

“A dreamy sojourn in the druggy, sexy counterculture of mid-1970s Melbourne, Australia... High times with the mother of autofiction."—Kirkus Reviews

“Reading Helen Garner for the first time is like discovering a new and thrilling language. I plan to read every word she has written. This novel is a gift and a marvel.” —Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria

About the Author

HELEN GARNER writes novels, stories, screenplays, and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, and her diaries Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This, and How to End a Story.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ACQUA PROFONDA

In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives. There were never enough chairs for us all to sit up at the meal table; one or two of us always sat on the floor or on the kitchen step, plate on knee. It never occurred to us to teach the children to eat with a knife and fork. It was hunger and all sheer function: the noise, and clashing of plates, and people chewing with their mouths open, and talking, and laughing. Oh, I was happy then. At night our back yard smelt like the country.

It was early summer.

And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t already have somebody to love. There was Martin, teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack, but who was as much a part of our household as any outsider could be. He slept very still in my bed, jumped up with the kids in the early morning, bore with my crankiness and fits of wandering heart. But he went up north for a fortnight and idly, at the turning of the year, I fell in love with our friend Javo, the bludger, just back from getting off dope in Hobart: I looked at his burnt skin and scarred nose and violently blue eyes. We sat together in the theatre, Gracie on my knee. He put his hand to the back of my head. We looked at each other, and would have gone home together without a word being spoken; but on our way out of the theatre we met Martin rushing in, back from Disaster Bay. Decorously, Javo got on his bike and rode home.

Not a matter of decorum, though, with Martin, who said to me shyly, knowing perhaps in his bones that nothing would be the same again,

‘I wish I could—you know—turn you on.’ And he did, and somehow we loved each other: I held his sharp, curly little head very tightly in my arms. We slept peacefully, knowing each other well enough not to need to touch.

I woke in the morning and heard at the same moment a rooster crow in a back yard and a clock strike in a house in Woodhead Street. I walked through our house. In the rooms people slept singly in double beds, nothing over them but a sheet, brown faces on still pillows. Gracie and Eve’s boy the Roaster sprawled in their bunks. A glass fish tinked at their window.

I put the kettle on to make the coffee, stared out the louvres of the kitchen window at the rough grass and the sky already hot blue.

At the Fitzroy baths, Martin and Javo lolled on the burning concrete. I clowned in the water at the deep end where the sign read ACQUA PROFONDA.

‘The others are waiting for me up at Disaster Bay,’ said Martin. ‘I’m going back today. Why don’t youse two come with me?’

‘OK,’ said Javo, who had nothing else to do, his life being a messy holiday of living off his friends.

‘Nora?’

I rolled and rolled in the water, deafening my ears while I thought of, and discarded, all the reasons why I shouldn’t go. I popped up, hanging on to the rail, hair streaming on my neck.

‘OK. I’ll come.’

Javo was looking at me.

So, afterwards, it is possible to see the beginning of things, the point at which you had already plunged in, while at the time you thought you were only testing the water with your toe.

We picked Gracie up from her kinder and left Melbourne that afternoon. By the time we had crossed the border into New South Wales it was well into night. The camp where the others were waiting for the supplies Martin had brought was a mile from the end of the track, round a rocky beach. It was dark and the tide was right in against the rocks. I picked up Gracie, who was too scared to speak, and waded blindly after Martin’s voice. I was soon wet to the thighs. Whenever a wave withdrew, invisible crabs clattered round my feet on the spiky rocks. I could dimly see Javo ahead of me with his boots over his shoulder. My ears were full of confusion and the sea thumping. Martin helped me scramble up the last slope, Gracie clinging like a monkey to my back, and in the sudden quiet between waves I saw the gleam of the tent in a small hollow. We stumbled in. The others woke in a mass of rugs and sleeping bags.

‘Did you bring anything to eat?’ I recognised Lou’s voice.

‘I couldn’t carry it over the rocks,’ lied Martin, who had forgotten it in his haste to bring us to the place.

‘We expected you yesterday, mate,’ complained Lou gently. ‘All we’ve got left is fuckin’ flour. Where have you been?’

People were sitting up among the blankets. We got used to the dark.

‘I got held up,’ said Martin, already having forgotten the problem, and pulling his jeans off ready to sleep on his full stomach.

‘You are a little weasel,’ Lou sighed. He turned over and went back to sleep.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon (February 20, 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553387456
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553387452
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.38 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.34 x 1.22 x 9.54 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #151,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #703 in Fiction Urban Life
- #9,625 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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3.7 493 ratings

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Helen Garner

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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.

Customer reviews

3.7 out of 5

493 global ratings

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langleyd

Too good to be overlooked

Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2024

A fictionalized, though realistic, story line set in a Melbourne, Australia commune/camp during the 1970s. The 1970s found most communities in upheavel as the mores and lifestyles were changing drastically and quickly. Each new day could find the rules of polite society stomped into something that only vaguely resembled current events. Helen Garner has set her story in a community of change and populated it with characters that are as hard to understand as the politics of the time. As Nora struggles through her life, she will forge a path that a woman with less strength could never come back from, all the while dragging her young daughter through the turmoil with her.

The story portrays the era in such a manner that you see the characters and hear the sound of rebellion that surges in and around them. Garner first released this book in 1977. Her research materials included her personal actions and observations, adding the "real" to the story. I've read several of her books and found them all so good that I never hesitate to recommend them to my reading circle.

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linda goodwin

We can't help who we love

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2014

Verified Purchase

Love a gritty book. One review talked about dysfunctional parenting but I saw it differently. It was a different time & different culture. I saw a great love story!

2 people found this helpful

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rita poole

Two Stars

Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2014

Boring

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2014

Verified Purchase

Load of nonsense. Nothing ever really happened. The same events kept happening over and over and no real ending was present.

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Lyn Williams

I think she is Australia's best female author

Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2013

Verified Purchase

I love all her books, my favourite being The Spare Room. She just has a wonderful way of describing things with not a wasted word.

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Emile Klein

A classic contemporary Australian author.

Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2020

Were you thinking of visiting Melbourne, or a fan of an earlier--more punk--era, or just looking for a distant but familiar land, and of love? Or maybe you're looking for lovely turns of phrase, kind word phrases. Well, here's a book to hold you, or your hands and wants, to pass those moments.

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2024

This book didn't grab my attention from the beginning, and I had a hard time staying engaged due to its slow pace and disjointed storyline. I couldn't connect with the characters, making it difficult to care about their journey. While the writing was polished, the lack of a coherent plot left me feeling disconnected. Though it's not a book I'd personally recommend or enjoy, readers who appreciate this style might find merit in it.

Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2023

Monkey Grip by H. Garner, published by Pantheon tells Nora's story. The single mom is living in Melbourne, Australia and this is her story. A story synonym for the zeitgeist and circumstances.
A story about interpersonal relations, drugs, life, love and more much more, raw and gritty. The storytelling is extraordinaire, ouztstanding and I can't get enough of the author's writing.
I recommend the book, 5 stars.

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Neal Ames

Its the same thought, over and over

Reviewed in Australia on April 10, 2022

Verified Purchase

Its the same thing, over and over again. The same repetative narrative. Nothing happens. Its like reading a Mills & Boon, but more cerebal, more psyhological. They say that a woman's mind is like a bucket of crabs, with one thought rising to the lip of the bucket, only to be pulled back down by the next random thought. That is what this book is like. It goes nowhere, presents nothing, and has no substance. The only saving grace, and it is minor, is the depth of character construction. But even there, other than her obsession with Javo, all the other characters that drift in and out of the story are shallow, and only loosely developed. Who was Gracie's father, and why does Gracie portray as an adult, with adult characteristics. And I am not convinced that the portrail of their sex lives is a true representation of what sex was like in Melbourne in the 70's. I don't know of anyone that approached their sex lives as they do in the book. And as for Tasmania, why was this story line in the book, other than a place for Javo to "dry out" in. This could have been explored more, but it just feels as though the author needed to pick somewhere, other than Melbourne, and seeing Hobart is a short flight away picked there. And finally, the ending, if you can call it that. Did we resolve anything. It is all left hanging. The word craft is sound, but nothing like a Winton, with beautiful prose. I expected something great, and ended up with vanilla icecream.

Barb

A Quiet Masterpiece

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 2, 2014

Verified Purchase

This is one of the greats of Australian literature - the story of a single mum in the 1970s, who falls in love with a junkie. It is set in a time of social turmoil, when Australians were rejecting the conservativism of their parents and empire and were messily trying to build a world of their own. Nora lives in a series of shared houses, where people drift in and out, some work, most are on the dole, but they are all living intensely; they talk, they plan, they drift a lot. This was the first generation of women who could chose to have kids, so had that freedom, but they were still stuck with them, so this was an important time for what came next. It could be called love in a time of revolution - these people were part of a giant social experiment, and from it came the confident, affluent, noisy Australia and its culture. My mother hated this book. More than enough reason to love it.

One person found this helpful

Deborah Fowler

Greater Expectations

Reviewed in Australia on October 12, 2022

Verified Purchase

I had heard so much about this book but I found it disappointing. The language is excellent but I found the repetition of a junkies life quite boring and desolate. His character seemed empty. Maybe times have changed and this book belongs to a different era.

Sandra Davies

Another example of the undefinable appeal of Australian writing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 18, 2016

Verified Purchase

Helen Garner is new to me (which seems shaming, given her place in Australian literature) and another of those Australian whose writing can be described (as it is on the cover of this book) "lyrical" and "rough-edged". In so many ways this shouldn't have worked - so many characters, no plot to speak of, little in the way of explanation - but told in such a way, and with such facility of language and insight, that it was totally compelling.
I need to seek out more.

amazrev

Disappointed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 9, 2020

Verified Purchase

Having read another novel by this author I thought I would enjoy this one. However, it was a tedious litany of sex, drugs, road trips and aimless wandering through a rather tedious life by a disparate group of drug addicts and free loaders. This pattern seemed to be on a mobius loop. Not for me.

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