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I read Monkey Grip for the first time maybe ten years ago. I remember being gripped. That’s a compliment, but I want to remind everyone: being gripped is a little frightening!! A grip wants something from you. Imagine someone just gripping your arm—it’s kinda threatening. A grip let you go until it gets what it wants from you. Monkey Grip’s characters can never quite get control of their lives, can’t quite hold themselves together. But Monkey Grip itself is so controlled, has the tightest tightest grip.
An Australian grunge-lit classic, the book closely tracks a relationship between Nora and her boyfriend, Javo, who is totally unreliable about everything except his love of heroin. A vague 1970s doom lurks everywhere. Nora and her young kid Gracie amble from one bohemian Melbourne share house to another. Nora’s art crowd group of friends overheat at the Fitzroy baths, take ill-fated trips, read the I-Ching and grasp for wisdom:
Reading Monkey Grip this time, I kept thinking about right after college, when a potentially disgraced professor taught me and my friend the tarot. One of the professor’s favorite metaphors was the Monkey Box (which I think was for the Devil card). The Monkey Box is a cruel trick some behaviorists potentially played on a monkey, involving a box with an opening just wide enough for a monkey to stick his paw in,. The monkey can feel that there’s a banana inside the box— but the opening’s not wide enough for the monkey to extract the banana. According to this professor, the monkey would die there, trapped by a treasure she couldn’t take with her.
When I Googled ‘Monkey Box’ there was nothing but suggestions for monkey pox. Googling ‘Monkey Grip meaning’ resulted in a Crossfit grip for holding a barbell. But when I researched (!!) the book, a 1978 article from the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Monkey Grip’s publisher as saying Helen Garner meant two things by the title. First, it’s a loving handclasp, and second, it’s the grip of heroin:
A mean test played on an animal, a terrible reliance on a drug: that’s the level of dark turmoil I felt the whole time reading. But I did it once, I did it twice, I’d do it again.
Also! Don’t let my rusty crusty copy indicate this book is hard to find, because Pantheon just published the first American edition of Monkey Grip. I gotta say I miss the over-the-shoulder momentum of my copy’s cover photo, but I do love swimming pool art in general.