On Beginnings: A Close Read of Helen Garner’s “Monkey Grip”

When I arrived to my college senior seminar in American Literature, I hadn’t read the first half of Moby-Dick. I was dating one person and in love with another and Captain Ahab’s obsession couldn’t compete with my own.

I consider it then one of the great strokes of luck in my life that the professor announced we’d be discussing the first paragraph of the novel for the next three hours.

“All of Moby-Dick is here in this first paragraph,” he said. A score for me and slackers everywhere.

It doesn’t happen often that the first few sentences of a book will utterly engross me, but it happened, memorably, with the first lines of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation; with The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; Unless by Carol Shields; The Millstone by Margaret Drabble; and again a few weeks ago, when I sat on a wooden bench outside a coffee shop, and cracked open Monkey Grip by Helen Garner. Published in 1977, the novel was Garner’s first and is now considered a classic of Australian literature.

To me, it’s a perfect opening, one with such astonishing beauty I committed to the next 320 pages for this first paragraph alone:

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.

Writers must be great thieves. I recently finished the draft of a book with an opening that’s fine but with which I’m not in love. So what can I steal from Monkey Grip?

The sense of time

Time here feels like nested boxes. Within the great span “every morning of our lives,” there is the specific “breakfast,” in which we see what that first meal of the day, every day, looks like: They eat bacon.

Who are “they”? We don’t know, other than that they are not particularly concerned with decorum or manners, as there are “never enough chairs”; people “always” spill from the table onto the floor and step, and it “never” occurred to them to teach the children to eat with utensils.

And then this marvelous, sudden shift from the ongoing (all those singing gerunds) to a more specific time: “Oh, I was happy then.”

Then! Not now—or maybe now, who knows yet—but then! So now this period of time is tinged with the nostalgia of memory.

Another deft move of time: Within this paragraph we travel from the morning’s smell of bacon to the evening, when “our backyard smelt like the country.” The next one-sentence paragraph situates us even more in time: “It was early summer.”

The sense of place

As much as I love a sensory detail, I can write from such embedded interiority, my narrators are like floating heads.

Here’s the first line of Sheila Heti’s Motherhood: “I often beheld the world at a great distance, or I didn’t behold it at all.”

Helen Garner beholds the world quite specifically: “In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city.” In this house there’s a kitchen—for me it’s almostly blindingly sunny and unadorned—without enough chairs for all the people in it, a detail that does a lot of work: There are more people present at breakfast than for whom can be materially provided a proper place to seat, but they make do. But it doesn’t feel like “making do,” I’d venture, because there’s bacon, for god’s sake, that breakfast meat of abundance, and all that talking and laughing.

The same way Garner moves us through time in this paragraph, she also moves us through space in a swirling shape: From the center of a city, into a house, into a kitchen, back out into a yard. The movement through time and place in this opening creates a kind of airiness and a free-roaming feeling of possibility. It’s the opposite of claustrophic.

The stakes

Joy and hunger shoot through the scene with cacophonous urgency: “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.” Then? Why not now?

I think of a sentence about “the collie” from the opening of Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”: “We used to call her the face of love.”

The stakes rear their head between what is and what used to be.

This first paragraph is followed by two one-sentence paragraphs. The second I mentioned earlier: “It was early summer.” The next urges the reader on further: “And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.”

And there we are, halfway down the page, and there’s nowhere to go but on.

The musicality

Read this paragraph aloud. Even that first sentence.

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.

Do you hear it? Two shorter clauses followed by a longer phrase. The way these varying sentences stack on another and echo. Plate on knee. Knife and fork.

Music creates the literary worlds I care about. My favorite books capture a quality of thought and observation, a mind-feeling. What I take from these books is usually a tone rather than a series of events. I can often not remember what happened in a book I love at all but can recall a moment or moving detail, the color of a coat, children sitting on the kitchen floor, eating bacon with their hands, and what it felt like to be with them.

The rules it breaks

Once an editor circled my every use of “it” in a draft. A helpful lesson that I will now never forget. But Garner’s not afraid of It! She begins two back-to-back sentences with “it.” “It never occurred to us,” and “It was hunger and all sheer fuction.” The effect is casual, familiar, off-the-cuff, perhaps even hurried, with an intimacy of narration that speaks to us in friendly shorthand. It makes me want to sit down with her on the kitchen floor.