Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

First published in Australia in 1977; published by Pantheon on February 20, 2024

Monkey Grip is regarded as a classic of Australian literature, the first novel of one of the nation’s most celebrated writers. I wouldn't say it has aged well.

The novel is narrated by Nora, a woman in her early thirties living in Melbourne in 1975. Nora has a daughter named Gracie, the product of her failed marriage, although Gracie plays a relatively small role in the novel (and seemingly in Nora’s life).

Nora is in love with a junky named Javo. Nora spends half the novel telling the reader how much she loves Javo. She spends the other half telling the reader how miserable Javo makes her. Love and misery often share the same paragraph.

Nora is a mess. She regularly does coke and acid. While she manages to hold a job and raise a daughter (activities that seem to happen in the background of her life), she’s hardly in a position to complain that Javo spends his dole money on heroin. She sleeps with other men but is jealous when other women show an interest in Javo. She breaks up with Javo and then pines for him. She takes him back and returns to a state of misery. Repeat and repeat and repeat.

One might think that heroin is the problem since Javo is by all accounts a likeable dude, but when Javo gets cleaned up for a period of time, Nora is even more upset with him because he doesn’t seem to need her as much as he does when he’s high. In fact, he starts sleeping with a different woman when he’s straight, which is definitely a bad sign for his relationship with Nora. Nora nevertheless seems to be his favorite partner, perhaps because she keeps her eyes open when they screw.

Javo shags an impressive number of women for an addict who steals from his friends when his money runs out. Nora seems willing to sleep with anyone who asks but she has fewer partners than Javo. Sometimes Gerald joins Nora in bed but, for ambiguous reasons, he won’t always shag her. This is not great for Nora’s self-esteem since he seems to have a sexual interest in other women.

Nora’s life is made messier by the domestic drama that surrounds it. A reader might need a spread sheet to keep track of who is shagging whom in this domestic drama. Nora’s friend Rita seems interested in messing around with Javo, and then with the boyfriend of Nora’s friend Angela. This gives Nora and Angela an excuse to be catty about Rita’s overall sluttiness. Rita’s regular boyfriend is Nick but he’s another junky. At some point I stopped trying to keep track of the characters, most of whom exist only to give main characters something to gossip about.

The men in the novel are all losers but what does that say about the women who desire them? That might be the question that animates Monkey Grip. Nora becomes “dried out with loneliness” if a guy isn’t making her wet. Nora clearly uses men for sex (which isn’t a problem since they are happy to be used), but she’s a bit of a hypocrite when she accuses Javo of using her for sex. She only seems to be happy when he’s shagging her, so what’s the problem?

Nora at least has some self-awareness. She understands her insecurities even if she does little to conquer them. She wonders “why I always need a man to be concerned with, whether well or ill.” She wonders why she is afraid to be alone. She wonders why she comforts herself by picking out the least attractive characteristics of women who share an interest in the men in her life. She wonders why she can’t screw the same person in a committed relationship for more than a couple of years before losing interest in the sex. She realizes that she is not a kind person and that her personality makes her unhappy. “So change yourself,” a reader might think, but Nora — like most people — is better at identifying faults than addressing them.

Perhaps my reaction to Monkey Grip is too judgmental. After all, Nora is living in a different age and culture than twenty-first century America. She rarely tells men what she’s really feeling because she’s been conditioned to obey “some unwritten law, blood-deep” that prevents women from being honest when they feel emotional pain. Nora has embraced the sexual revolution but notions of gender equality that are central to modern feminism have not empowered her. That’s probably not her fault as she likely hasn’t been exposed to those ideas.

So maybe I’m being too harsh, but I was more annoyed by Nora than sympathetic to her plight. Perhaps I should have been enlightened by Nora’s reaction to the emotional burden of loving a man who makes her life so difficult, but I just wanted her to come to her senses. Monkey Grip has interesting moments, but I might have enjoyed it for its shock value in 1977. Today, it feels dated.

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The Secret Sharer by Robert Silverberg

First published in 1987; published in a limited edition by Subterranean Press on February 29, 2024

It’s been years since I read Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Secret Sharer. I recall it as the story of a stowaway who is discovered and concealed by the young ship’s captain. The captain feels an affinity with the hidden passenger. Robert Silverberg borrowed the broad outline of Conrad’s plot as well as the title for his 1987 novella. Subterranean Press is issuing the novella as a signed limited edition that might make a nice gift for Silverberg fans. Readers who don’t want to buy a limited edition can probably scour used book stores to pick up the novella in a collection of Silverberg’s best stories, but those readers will miss out on some cool illustrations.

The young captain in Silverberg’s story is named Adam. He is in charge of a starship. The ship is relatively frail, as Adam’s body will be after a long time away from planetary gravity. Neither the ship nor the captain can venture too near a planet.

The ship carries cargo and passengers to various destinations, where they are met by sturdier ships that ferry people and goods between the planet and the ship. Some passengers travel between stars in sleep chambers, while others leave their body behind and travel as a “matrix” that will be transferred to a new body.

Shortly after Adam’s first voyage begins, a matrix detaches from the grid that holds it. The matrix tries to enter a sleeping passenger but the passenger awakens and, in a panic, destroys the equipment that is keeping his body alive.

The matrix then makes contact with Adam. After telling him a sad story, she gains his permission to enter his body via a jack that allows the captain to plug into the ship. The matrix is the consciousness of a woman named Leeleaine, although she prefers the name Vox.

The other crew members are superstitious about the prospect of a loose matrix floating around the ship, particularly one who killed a passenger. They make efforts to capture it, placing Vox and the captain at risk. Can Vox return to the grid? Can she stay in Adam without being detected? Whether Vox will survive is the central question that gives the story its dramatic tension.

Silverberg has a long history of writing touching science fiction stories that are based on characterization rather than technology. Adam and Vox grow close to each other as they share a body. Both feel like outsiders who instantly understand each other. Both feel an intense loneliness when they are separated. That makes the novella something of a tragic love story. Silverberg creates sympathy for both characters and at least some measure of suspense before the story reaches a fitting resolution.

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The Chaos Agent by Mark Greaney

Published by Berkley on February 20, 2024

While Gray Man novels are about action, not deep thought, The Chaos Agent might be seen as a cautionary tale about the consequences of misusing Artificial Intelligence — specifically, by creating autonomous weapons that are guided by an AI. The concept of autonomous AI weaponry has been familiar to fans of science fiction novels and Terminator movies for decades, but The Chaos Agent offers a credible and timely look at how AI killing machines might threaten the world at a time when political leaders are asking whether it would be wise to regulate AI technology.

Granted, most of the concern about AI has involved pranksters creating deepfake videos and students using ChatGPT to write term papers. Autonomous weapons — machines that make their own decisions about when and how to engage in battles — could pose a greater existential threat than most other unfortunate uses of AI.

Court Gentry, aka Violator, aka the Gray Man, is traveling in South America with his dangerous lover Zoya Zakharova. They’re trying to stay under the radar of the many people who want to kill them. That plan is thwarted by a drone that happens to be watching a Russian who is watching Zoya. The Russian wants Zoya’s help to exfiltrate an agent in Mexico who has information about autonomous weapons. Zoya would like to help but Court wants none of it. He is nevertheless sucked into danger when the drone sends his picture to a bad guy who identifies him as a target.

More immediate targets are scientists and engineers who are being killed in countries around the world. Different intelligence agencies have different theories about how they are connected. Their connection to weaponized AI will be apparent to the reader, but why they need to be assassinated is less obvious.

One threat leads to another as Gentry is targeted by a former CIA assassin. After a series of action scenes, Gentry agrees to help the CIA get to the bottom of the murders and to thwart the risk of giving a tactical advantage to whichever nation is the first to develop autonomous weaponry. Machines that fight on their own initiative are faster and deadlier than humans operating weapons. As science fiction and thriller fans know, an AI that can train itself to adapt to changing battlefield conditions will eventually decide that the best tactic to assure its own survival is the eradication of all humanity. Gentry decides it might be wise to prevent that from happening.

One of the scientists who has been targeted is Anton Hinton. He has a lab in Cuba and a strong security team, but he strengthens the team by hiring Zack Hightower. Series fans will recognize Hightower as a former CIA paramilitary guy who once worked with, and later worked against, Gentry. Hightower and Gentry are fated to reunite in Cuba.

The plot is intelligent, although it is largely an excuse for action scenes. That isn’t a complaint. Shootouts, explosions, chases, crashing trucks through fences, all the good stuff that looks cool in movies is just as fun on paper, given Mark Greaney’s cinematic writing style. Greaney is one of the best action writers in the business.

Gray Man novels are a cut above most tough guy action novels because the plots are tight, intelligent, and surprisingly credible. And if a plot element might not be credible, Greaney makes the storyline seem plausible in the moment, even when Gentry is shooting at four-legged war machines that would be at home in a Star Wars movie. The Chaos Agent is an entertaining action story, but if it makes people think about the risks of using AI as a weapon, the novel will have served a higher purpose.

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The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

Published by Tor Books on February 20, 2024

I loved this book. I recognize that I loved it because it pushed my buttons. Readers who do not share those buttons might not like it as much as I did, although it is a well told story that most fans of crime novels should appreciate. While stories about violence dominate crime fiction, I was pleased to read a book that focused both on financial crime and, even better, the dismal intersection of corporate greed and America’s prison industry.

Martin Hench is a forensic accountant. He recovers misappropriated money in exchange for 25% of the recovery. Hench first appeared in Red Team Blues. The Bezzle takes place a few years earlier. Hench is comfortable but not yet wealthy. He still needs to work from time to time to replenish his funds.

Hench hasn’t seen his friend Scott Warms in some time, so he is happy to receive Harms’ invitation to spend a long weekend on Catalina Island. Warms made a bundle of money by selling a startup to Yahoo. He knows many other wealthy people in the tech industry, some of whom vacation on Catalina. Warms and Hench plan to spend the weekend attending parties, drinking high-end alcohol, and doing drugs. Cocaine and weed, of course, but they also enjoy hallucinogens.

One of the parties is thrown by Lionel Coleman Jr. Hench learns from a driver that Coleman is importing fast food meals from the mainland, freezing them, and selling them to islanders who crave fast food because the franchises aren’t allowed to operate on Catalina. The labor is performed by people who have been recruited into a Ponzi scheme that Coleman has orchestrated. Hench convinces the driver that he will eventually lose everything he owns, as will his friends, family members, and most of the working-class island residents before Coleman disappears to the mainland with their cash.

Coleman doesn’t need the money he steals from the islanders; it’s small change to him. He steals it because he can. The novel suggests that he is representative of greedy, wealthy people around the world, people who operate fraudulent schemes of one sort or another, who dupe investors and consumers but rarely pay a price for their shameful behavior. They use campaign contributions and lobbyists to carve out loopholes in legislation that let them get away with fraud. Voters who are distracted by right wing screeds about crime and border invasions pay scant attention to the crime that actually affects them because those criminals are branded as entrepreneurs.

Hench causes Coleman’s scheme to crash before he can maximize his gains, forcing him to run back to the mainland before he is tarred and feathered. Coleman desires vengeance, a desire he satisfies when Warms is arrested for cocaine possession. The cocaine isn’t his, but Warms is a standup guy and won’t give up the person who left it in his car. He accordingly gets a monster three-strike sentence (the first two strikes being relatively inconsequential felony convictions for assault on an officer and drug possession during Warms’ youthful years).

Coleman has put together a bunch of businesses in the private prison industry that scam state government and prisoners alike. The prisons make money by cutting staff, which means cutting visitors, libraries, and efforts at rehabilitation. The evils that Doctorow writes about, including ridiculously expensive tolls that families must pay to speak to prisoners, are shockingly real, but they are a scam that most Americans don’t care about because prisoners don’t have lobbyists.

Coleman uses his leverage with the private prison system to make Warms’ life hell. When Hench starts looking into the ways that Coleman’s businesses are defrauding the government, Coleman threatens to have Warms killed if Hench doesn’t back off.

Cory Doctorow makes the point that successful businessmen confuse greed with intelligence. Hench is smarter than Coleman, leading to a relatively happy ending, assuming that anything about an unjust three-strikes imprisonment can be regarded as happy. But Warms is a likeable character who is upset when Hench seems willing to back away from Coleman just to save Warms’ skin. I always admire characters who are willing to sacrifice for the good of others.

And I admire Doctorow for telling an engaging story that spotlights the evil of private prisons. The issue doesn’t interest most people because, as Doctorow writes, “America will never make life better for the millions of souls it has imprisoned. Never. It’s not in our character.” Some sickness in the American soul causes people to believe that prisoners deserve to suffer. Americans like to feel superior to all the people we place behind bars until our children or friends join their ranks. Yet the people who really need to be in prison, the corporate fraudsters who have done much more damage than a typical three-strikes felon, never pay a price for their antisocial behavior.

Doctorow touches on other financial issues, including real estate investment schemes that profit by taking homes from underwater homeowners and the refusal of financial regulators to do their jobs because “regulation” is a dirty word to politicians who accept campaign contributions from regulated businesses. He writes about corrupt cops and a broken political system. And again touching on a neglected issue that is dear to me, he writes about the enormous profits the federal court system makes by charging the public to access supposedly “public” records — records that everyone should be able to see for free, rather than paying for the privilege of monitoring the actions of judges and lawyers in a judicial process that pretends to be open to the public.

Doctorow takes on all these issues without losing sight of the novelist’s primary goal: to tell an entertaining story. In part because the story is based on important issues that are usually ignored, in part because Doctorow’s central characters live their beliefs — beliefs that are founded in altruism rather than greed — and in part because the story is appealing, The Bezzle is a joy to read.

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Plastic by Scott Guild

Published by Pantheon on February 13, 2024

Sometimes, after the fifth or sixth time I’ve said to myself “I’m not sure I like this book,” I stop reading it. I persevered with Plastic. A mix of engaging moments and wtf moments convinced me that my continued attention was warranted, but in the end, my reaction remains: I’m not sure I like this book.

Erin seems to be living in a television show, or perhaps she views her life that way. Chapters start with “In this scene,” followed by a description of Erin’s activities, presumably narrated by Erin. She watches a popular television show (Nuclear Family, a show about post-apocalyptic teen angst in which some of the characters are waffles or robots) and talks to friends about their membership in the Church of Divine Acceptance, a pseudo-religion that equates faith with technology (“No God or weird stuff there.”).

Conjugations of “to be” and other bits of conventional sentence structure have disappeared in Erin’s post-apocalyptic world (“How Owen doing? He back home now?” is answered “He just get out hospital”), although Erin speaks fluidly when she narrates her life. The language change seems odd given that kids still play Marco Polo (words that seem more likely to disappear than “is” and “of”). But the kids are made of plastic, so any additional oddness is comparatively easy to accept.

Ah yes, the plastic. Perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier. Erin and her friends are plastic “figurines.” Maybe they only feel like they are plastic (a final scene suggests they might really have skin made of flesh), although they repair injuries to their bodies with Wound Glue. They seem human in most other respects, including the pleasure they take in alcohol, drugs, and sex. Erin sometimes orders a Hot Date when she wants to get laid, although her Smartbody can give her an equivalent experience with a virtual hookup.

Erin spent her inheritance on a Smartbody to help her avoid the reality of terrorism, global warming (the “heat leap”) caused by burning chicken bones as fuel, and the aftermath of a nuclear conflict. She escapes into a virtual reality called Smartworld.

Erin uses virtual reality to recreate Patrick, who died in front of her in a high school terrorism incident. She even gives herself a virtual pregnancy until she becomes angry and clicks the menu for a virtual abortion. Later in the story, Erin will develop a relationship with Jacob, a blind figurine.

Erin’s sister disappeared a terrorist bombing. Her father died of Brad Pitt disease (and perhaps of a broken heart after his boyfriend left him). In the virtual world, Erin receives unwanted warnings that caution her to avoid terrorist attacks. She suspects she knows the source of the warnings but doesn’t want to confirm her suspicions. On the other hand, not reporting the warnings will have its own consequences, including (at the least) being placed on a watch list by the oppressive government that tries to keep everyone under constant surveillance. That’s easy when people spend most of their lives getting high and living in a virtual world.

My impression is that Scott Guild excelled in creative writing classes. Plastic is certainly creative, but the novel feels like a series of gimmicks — interesting gimmicks, to be sure — that never quite cohere into a whole that is equal to, much less greater than, the sum of its parts. I didn’t become absorbed in the reality that Guild built, perhaps because I never quite saw its point. The metaphor of people living plastic lives seems a bit obvious. Still, Plastic might encourage readers to see quasi-religion, the risks of totalitarian government, terrorism, virtual reality, and the other topics that animate the story in a new light. Barring that, the story has some entertainment value, even if it doesn’t promote emotional engagement with its plastic characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS