Monkey grip book5/10/2023 ![]() ![]() In Monkey Grip, women have a dance, go to the dunny, check each other to see if there’s period blood on their dress, and then go home to maybe ‘fuck their arses off’. It’s a plainer, scrappier sort of book, but that’s exactly right, because Australia was, and is, a plainer, scrappier sort of place. ![]() Monkey Grip got the amounts of us and them in better proportion. Patrick White got a lot of hot, fresh Australia into his books, but he thought he had to out-English the English and hold it all in a thick, heavy modernist casing – a modernist baroque. Plenty of books had been written by Australians and were supposed to be about Australia, but in their style, their form, they were always more than half English. ![]() Many learned persons will disagree with me, but I think Monkey Grip, first published in 1977, was the first time a lot of hot, fresh, plain Australian language and behaviour really coexisted with literature. But who’s strong, who can help me, here? And the book I found that did help – not the only one, but the one that seemed to bring special news about what was possible in Australia – was Monkey Grip. There must be tens of thousands of Australians who have gone through this: you’re young, you read Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary, or other books as strong, and you think: alright, that’s very, very strong. I read Monkey Grip when I was first trying to learn to be a writer, and looking around to see if there was anything Australian that could help me. ![]()
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