Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

First published: 1977

Type of work: Romance in the form of a personal diary and existential journal

Time of work: 1974-1975

Locale: Melbourne, Sydney, and Tasmania

Principal Characters:

• Nora, the narrator and protagonist, a thirty-two-year-old film extra
• Gracie, her daughter, age five
• Javo, a twenty-three-year-old stage and screen actor
• Eve, a friend of Nora
• Rita, Nora’s friend and eventual housemate, in love with Nick
• Juliet, Rita’s daughter, whose behavior disturbs Nora
• Angela, another close friend of Nora, a singer
• Martin, one of Nora’s former lovers
• Julian, Martin’s brother
• Francis, the twenty-three-year-old director of a film about drug addiction
• Lillian, a vamp
• Gerald, a rock musician
• Clive, another of Nora’s former lovers
• Jessie, another friend of Nora and formerly Javo’s lover
• Georgie, mated with Eve
• Claire, another friend of Nora, who sleeps with Javo

The Novel

Monkey Grip begins randomly one Australian summer in 1974, when Nora, the narrator and protagonist, is relatively happy, living with her five-year-old daughter Gracie in a Melbourne commune and sleeping with Martin, who is more friend than lover. Nora shares the house with three friends: Eve, Georgie, and Clive, a former lover.

Nora’s life changes when she meets Martin’s friend Javo, who is hooked on heroin. Despite his addiction, she falls hopelessly in love with Javo, although she continues to sleep with others. (Nora is famous for her promiscuity.) Javo is rebounding from a broken romance with Jessie, who left him because of his “smack” (heroin) habit. Jessie and Nora are friends, and Jessie does her best to warn Nora of the heartbreak Javo will surely bring her.

Nora gets a job working as an extra on a film about junkies. Javo, meanwhile, drifts in and out of her life, going to Tasmania at one point, then to Southeast Asia with Martin. The two of them are thrown into jail in Bangkok for stealing a pair of sunglasses, if one can believe the story that is told to Nora. Nora has a brief sexual fling with Francis, the director of the film on which she worked as an extra, but she yearns for the return of Javo, even though her life is far less complicated without him. Martin’s brother Julian goes to Bangkok and manages to bail Martin and Javo out of jail.

When the house in which Nora and her friends live is sold, Nora and her daughter Gracie move into another house with Nora’s friend Rita and Rita’s daughter, Juliet. Javo’s eventual homecoming brings sorrow as well as joy, since he returns more addicted than ever. Meanwhile, Nora has taken a job working on a newspaper published by her friends in the women’s movement. Javo works as an actor in a Brecht play, and after the play closes, he promises to take the cure. Nora and Gracie go with him to Sydney and stay with a friend named Peggy. At this juncture, Javo is off heroin, but even so, he and Nora are not getting along well; during the trip to Sydney, Nora and Javo decide to end their relationship.

Nora and Gracie return to Melbourne on their own by train. Nora gets a punk haircut. She briefly resumes her relationship with Clive, the first of a number of surrogate lovers to replace Javo. Finally, now using cocaine heavily, she takes up with Gerald, whom her friend Angela characterizes as “weird” and who is similar in this regard to Javo. Nora seems drawn to destructive relationships.

Javo keeps returning, however, and he is allowed to sleep in Rita’s studio because he has no place else to go. When Javo apparently steals eighty dollars of Rita’s rent money, Nora breaks with him again and then moves into a house on Rowe Street with Gerald. Javo’s theft may partly explain her reason for moving, but the main reason for this move seems to be that Nora does not get along with Rita’s daughter, Juliet. As usual, Nora’s motives are relatively obscure.

Gerald loves Nora, but Nora still loves Javo and ignores Gerald. Then a woman named Lillian takes Gerald away from Nora, and Nora’s “friend” Claire takes Javo away from her. The last time Nora sees Javo, he is gentle with her, but she recognizes “the gentleness of the departing to the one left behind.” The novel ends with Nora attempting to reconcile herself to a life without Javo—the problem the whole novel has been attempting to resolve.

The Characters

“People’s lives are just gossip fodder,” Nora remarks to Javo early in the novel, after Javo has suspected her of being unfaithful with Francis, the director of the film on drug addiction. Monkey Grip thrives on “gossip fodder” and often reads like an expose of communal freaks whose lives are devoted to free love and drug involvement. Nora and her circle are involved in filmmaking, rock music, and the women’s movement. Javo is an actor who is seen working in cinema and on a Brecht play while the novel is in progress. His picture has appeared in Cinema Papers, the major trade publication for Australian filmmakers.

The characters of Monkey Grip are almost entirely ego-involved, self-destructive, and hurtful. Half of them are serious drug addicts, stumbling through the narrative with dilated pupils. Javo, for example, steals from Nora and Rita, who are kind enough to provide him with bed and board, love and care. The rest of the characters are equally aimless, as is the narrative itself. One primary interest of this novel, therefore, would seem to be sociological, outlining the behavior of the rock-punk counterculture, latterday hippies and freaks, erstwhile radicals who have lost the idealism and sense of purpose of their predecessors of the 1960’s.

The novel is written in the first person, and Nora, the narrator, takes much for granted. She is a feeling, emotional character who does not understand her own motivation. She is addicted to love, or lust, whichever is convenient in context. She seems most to fear loneliness. The sexual habits of those in her communal circle are extremely casual, but the constant bedhopping that is taken for granted by virtually all these characters does not rule out jealousy, even between Nora and Rita, who are the closest of friends—even Doppelgangers, in that each has a daughter and each is involved romantically with a drug addict: Nora with Javo and Rita with Nick.

By far the most interesting characters are the women. Nora and Rita are two of the strongest, though neither is quite strong enough to carry her emotional burdens gracefully. Both have self-doubts, both are attracted to junkies, and both are promiscuous. Rita finally cannot resist seducing Willy, for example, making Angela, his “mate,” furious. When Angela shares her anger with Nora and Eve, Eve articulates the code which governs their relationships with men: “There’s one thing you just don’t do, and that’s take away another woman’s man.” Nora points out the basic contradiction between Angela’s anger and the feminist “theory” in which they all supposedly believe: “If you think that,” she says to Eve, “what’ve we been agonising about all this time? All that stuff about breaking out of monogamy?”

Nevertheless, Nora yearns for the stability of a monogamous relationship with Javo that would protect her from the agony of loneliness. Moreover, Nora feels about Lillian, the vamp, the same way that Angela feels about Rita. Lillian broke up Nora’s relationship with Jack and threatens to steal Javo away from her as well. Late in the novel, Lillian makes a pass at Gerald; thereafter, Gerald goes off with Lillian. Lillian is more attractive than Nora, and Nora hates her for that reason. So is Rita, and at one point Nora fears that Rita will steal Javo from her. Still, she is Rita’s friend and can therefore appreciate her consideration and kindness. In the final analysis, however, these women are sexual predators and must constantly be wary of one another. Friendships under such constraints can hardly be ideal. One of Nora’s deeper insights into human nature is that “there is no logic in feelings.” If that is a measure of her perceptiveness, it is also a measure of her banality.

Critical Context

Monkey Grip won Australia’s National Book Award, despite mixed critical response. Reviewing the novel for The Times Literary Supplement, Galen Strawson reasonably protested that “there is no development of a theme, no progressive revealing of a character, no sustained enrichment of a reflection.” On the other hand, The New Yorker judged the novel to be “elegant and wry” rather than maudlin or merely gruesome. Australian critic Peter Kemp described the novel in Filmnews as a “consciously personal deliberately rambling chronicle.”

Certainly the novel takes the form of a diary or personal journal, and reading it is often embarrassing, partly because of Nora’s candidness, partly because one is made to feel like a voyeur. The advantage of this format is the sense of immediacy and authenticity that is created. The disadvantage is the sometimes maddeningly casual nature of the narrative. The novelist drops names of characters who have not been properly introduced. The reader has to remember who is who and can build a history for each character only by carefully cross-referencing the text. The novel, one is tempted to conclude, makes unreasonable demands of the reader for what it offers in return.

Besides the awkwardness of the easy informality that forces one into an intimate relationship with characters whom one may not wish to know intimately, the all-too-personal journal approach has a fragmented and disjointed structure that often seems utterly random and meaningless. The novelist appears to have no control at all over the chaos of everyday life. Things simply happen, and the novelist feels no apparent compunction to explain the significance of the seemingly random events or to provide a thoughtful context. It is certainly quite possible that the story may be partly autobiographical (Monkey Grip is a first novel) and that it may therefore be laden with significance for the novelist, but as a novel, this extended diary is not entirely satisfactory to the reader. Monkey Grip is personal to the point of being an exercise in narcissistic indulgence.

Despite these drawbacks, Monkey Grip was a best-seller and in 1981 was made into a film directed by Ken Cameron and scripted by Cameron and Helen Garner, who worked with the actress portraying Nora to get more of the book back into the film than Cameron had provided in his original treatment.

The shapelessness of the story would seem to constitute a major flaw. As Strawson noted in The Times Literary Supplement, the novel has “no plot, no thickening, no knot, no denouement. It could be read backwards.” The book is a chronicle of an emotional life that attempts to raise the banal to significance. Perhaps future generations will find this novel to be of more sociological than literary importance.

Bibliography

Ableman, Paul. “Left-overs,” in The Spectator. CCXLIV (January 26, 1980), p. 21.

Hanscom, Marion. Review in Library Journal. CVI (July, 1981), pp. 1442-1443.

Kramer, Kathryn. “A Pleasant Discord,” in The New York Times Book Review. XCI (December 7, 1986), p. 79.

The New Yorker. Review. LVII (July 13, 1981), p. 106.

Shrimpton, Nicholas. “Seizing by the Neck,” in New Statesman. XCIX (February 1, 1980), pp. 174-175.

Strawson, Galen. “Junkie Jottings,” in The Times Literary Supplement. January 18, 1980, p. 54.