Then! Not now-or maybe now, who knows yet-but then! So now this period of time is tinged with the nostalgia of memory.Īnother 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 placeĪs much as I love a sensory detail, I can write from such embedded interiority, my narrators are like floating heads.
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.Īnd then this marvelous, sudden shift from the ongoing (all those singing gerunds) to a more specific time: “Oh, I was happy then.” 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. So what can I steal from Monkey Grip? The sense of time I recently finished the draft of a book with an opening that’s fine but with which I’m not in love. At night our back yard smelt like the country. It was hunger and all sheer function: the noise, and clashing of plates, and people chewing with their mouths open, and talking and laughing. It never occurred to us to teach the children to eat with a knife and fork. 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. 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. To me, it’s a perfect opening, one with such astonishing beauty I committed to the next 320 pages for this first paragraph alone: Published in 1977, the novel was Garner’s first and is now considered a classic of Australian literature. 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. 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. “All of Moby-Dick is here in this first paragraph,” he said. 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.
I was dating one person and in love with another and Captain Ahab’s obsession couldn’t compete with my own. When I arrived to my college senior seminar in American Literature, I hadn’t read the first half of Moby-Dick. On Beginnings: A Close Read of Helen Garner’s “Monkey Grip”
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