Tim is a fan of Helen Garner and has been telling me to read her for ages so I finally gave her a chance. As I should have known, I completely agree that she is excellent.

I didn’t want to start in the same place Tim did. Garner’s most famous book is This House of Grief, a true crime story about the murder of three children. It is apparently stunningly well written but I don’t think I will ever feel able to read that.

Monkey Grip was her first novel, based on her own life in Melbourne in the 1970s. The degree to which it is or is not fictionalized has caused Garner some negative press over the decades since its publication. But as she points out in this essay, even if she did just edit her own diaries and change all the names – she wrote those diaries in the first place. This is still original writing by her. And it really is original.

The narrator Nora is a single mother in her early 30s living in bohemian house shares with her young daughter Grace. We follow her over roughly a year as she meets a heroin addict called Jago, they start a relationship and it becomes increasingly tumultuous.

There’s some pretty tough scenes in here, depicting both drug taking and its effects. Garner is largely non-judgemental of the addicts she depicts – perhaps too lacking in judgement – but she also doesn’t shy away from the petty crime and ensuing distrust that comes with drug use.

Somehow this isn’t overall a dark book. Garner includes plenty of joy. I loved the details of Nora and friends cycling to the community pool; going out dancing or to watch plays starring her friends; but best of all are the small moments the narrator shares with her young daughter.

“The brightness of that expanse of concrete is atomic: eyes close up involuntarily, skin flinches. I lower myself gingerly on to the blazing ground and watch the kids approach the pool. The Roaster slips over the side and wades inexorably deeper; Gracie waves to me and squints, wraps her wiry arms around my belly, and sinks like a rich American lady beneath the chemicals.”

It was quite a long way through the book before I realised that Nora does have a job. A couple of them in fact. She’s a writer, primarily a book reviewer, and she helps produce a magazine for a women’s collective. I would love to have learned more about these aspects of her life but they stay firmly in the background. The focus is on the relationships in Nora’s life – friendships as well as romance and sex.

It’s also quite a long way through the book before it’s revealed that Grace’s father is still around and part of her life – though he and Nora are very much finished. He also lives in a house share in central Melbourne, sharing some of Nora’s friends, and they seem to be on fairly good terms.

It’s slice-of-life, starting and ending at what could be argued are arbitrary points in an ongoing story. But it’s also a very full year with an emotional arc. Though there is no clear resolution, I was left with the impression that Nora is ready to take life a little steadier, that she has confronted her own complacence when it comes to hard drugs around her daughter. 

Garner’s style is stripped back, including just the right details, the quirks and observations, to bring people and scenes to life in relatively few words. Even when she is being more abstract and reflective, there is a straightforwardness that I appreciate.

“I’m out of sync here. No grip, clutch slipping. I’m not frightened. I know when he goes back to India I won’t miss him. He gives me nothing, and yet at the same time everything. The way I usually talk has no purchase on the surface of his life, or on its surfacelessness. At the point when I realise this, the point at which frustration or annoyance would normally push me past such a situation, my mind quietly slips a cog and I float away.”

I’ll definitely be reading more Garner. 

Published 1977 by McPhee Gribble.

Source: Borrowed from Tim