I Have to Praise You

On Alexis Wright's "Praiseworthy," an incantatory vision of Aboriginal Australian life

Declan Fry calls Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy a “baggy monster,” Joy Williams a “hammerhead novel,” Samuel Rutter a “violent pas de deux” of “the layering of time and the riot of language,” Ruth Padel an “impassioned environmental Ulysses of the Northern Territory,” all these descriptors attempts at encapsulating this imposing tome. It is not like any other novel anyone’s ever read, and so it comes to critics to use these slantwise descriptors to try and approach the thing. Words… your words have no purchase here! Not when Alexis Wright is dropping sentences like this:

Old sulky, oh, loved the theatre of atmospheric soup that was gathered by the bucketload at top speed, where all the cyclically generated hardcore never-ending epics of hatefulness were mashed up in a monstrous fast-paced dance, and just as fantastically, instantaneously almost, spat triumphantly into community operatic wonderment, a match that was reminiscent of the choir of Verdi’s Gloria all’Egitto, as projectiles of polluted dirt-engrained plastic shards shooting like glistened stars into the hot and sticky humidity of the hazy atmosphere were marching steadfastly into the festering human lungs of the whole song cycle thing, now jammed on repeat cycle, and the traditional owners in their continuous rows, arguing about who the true traditional owner was anymore, could not do a thing about it.

Whew! Just stand back! Wright’s monstrosity (positive) novel is a looping accumulation of this kind of prose, a swirling mass not unlike the cloud of haze that settles over the titular town of Praiseworthy at the outset of the novel. Set in the aftermath of the Australian government’s 2007 “Intervention” in Aboriginal communities, Wright – a member of the indigenous Waanyi nation who now reside in Northern Australia – spins a wild tale of assimilation and its discontents, all underneath a hazy maelstrom with no apparent cause and no solution.

Yes, the supercell anomaly was a miracle on Earth, but not a good one. Sometimes the haze floated, rested on dust-colored leaves, on the rooftops, on every space, house, person, on the dog fur, bird feathers, or else, the thing charged up its weather system into an atmospheric mess of dry electrical storms full of dust. Jundurr! Jundurr! Jundurr! From the sky, you could look down, to see the supercell rotating from where it sat permanently over Praiseworthy, lingering with its belly hovering just centimetres above the ground as though it was resting on a head full of swiftly dit! dit! dit! imaginings. The gravitational force of the slow-moving cloud of haze pushed by the great ancestral government, and held together as though magnetised, hanging like a shadow that made the place perpetually looking sepia, like suppertime.

At the novel’s center is the Steel family; pere Cause Man (aka Widespread, aka Planet) has a crazy notion to get ahead of the upcoming climate catastrophe by assembling a fleet of five million donkeys to provide shipping and transport services once fossil fuels are no longer available; Dance, his wife, communes with moths and butterflies and dreams of moving her family to China, her supposed ‘original’ home; Aboriginal Sovereignty, their seventeen year old son, is driven to despair after being arrested for his betrothal to his fifteen year old girlfriend; and the youngest child, eight year old Tommyhawk, is a little blackpilled proto-fascist, having glommed on to conservative media from an early age and fully subsumed its toxic message about the pathology of the indigenous. Tommyhawk schemes and dreams only of being adopted by the most powerful white woman in the country, the prime minister, and saved from the (imagined) hell of Praiseworthy. Rounding out the main cast is Praiseworthy’s mayor, Ice Pick, who is so desirous to assimilate with white Australia that he becomes white himself, struck by a sudden albinism.

Plot is hardly important in Wright’s novel – her form is more recursive than traditional forward momentum allows – but the basic bones of it are: Cause Man leaves town in a rustbucket for his donkeys; Tommyhawk plots his way out of Praiseworthy, thinking that the town is full of pedophiles (because that’s all he hears about online and on the radio), and reports his brother to the authorities; Dance looks after all the donkeys Cause Man has left behind, and becomes a moth(er), in conversation with both butterflies and spirits of the land’s ancestors; Aboriginal Sovereignty, unfortunately aptly for his name, walks into the sea after his arrest; and Ice Pick does his best to make his town palatable to white outsiders, eventually leading a cynical attempt to find Aboriginal Sovereignty’s ‘killer’ rather than face the wave of youth suicide in his town. If it sounds a bit spare for a nearly seven hundred page novel, well, it is, but, like in Beckett’s and Faulkner’s more discursive books, or going back to the tradition of oral storytelling, the narrative pleasure is found in repetition and doublingback, the slow rhythmic accretion of events, the way that every event is doubly and triply narrativized, here by a literal multitude of voices. Each chapter invokes a different oracle to tell it a different way – “like a wise man,” “like a business man,” or just “true” – and each of the main characters is treated with their own distinctive mode. There’s the frenetic scheming and economic bravado of Cause Man; the ethereal communion with nature of Dance; Aboriginal Sovereignty’s mournful vacillations standing before the sea; Tommyhawk’s tech-addled brain that’s overdosed on every negative media story about his own people; and the slimy political maneuvering of Ice Pick, always willing to sell out his constituents for a bit of white approval.

The novel is by turns raucous, satiric, tragic, and trenchant, sometimes all in the same sentence. It can be, at the same time, fantastic and all-too-real, a freewheeling trip through multiple genres, through the grim future of the world’s climate, and through the past, current, and the ever-ongoing disaster of the Australian government’s treatment of its indigenous people. Race and racism, misogyny, global capital, xenophobia, the creation of native pathology, environmental disaster, assimilation, suicide, self determination; all this (and more) is put under Wright’s microscope without the book ever becoming preachy or didactic. It is simply a book capacious enough to contain everything, dense with detail and full of the surprise of reality, at once in conversation with the hyperpresent and with a deep ancestral past. Look how much is covered in just this passage, as Widespread drives his bucket-of-bolts Falcon through the spinifex of the outback in search of a mystical perfect donkey:

Was this dream holy? Crazy? Stolen business? This was how the Anthropocene business worked. You drive humanity for the survival of the richest, and Widespread was dead-eyed straight about the business between black and white built on theft, and it would only be through continuously readjusting the equity scales with dexterity like he was doing, and finely balancing the bottom line, as he said was necessary in his discussions with the Falcon, how he was putting an Aboriginal man on top for once, by building his own global empire from other people’s rubbish, by taking a few feral donkeys off their hands. The dawn road was nothing suss, it inspired philanthropical thinking in faraway places, and Widespread lead-footed the Falcon because questing burst his energy from the seams, and he was in the mood for grabbing his share of global leadership, by being ten steps ahead of the global meltdown.

But even beyond how much this covers is the fact that it maintains its musicality; it is never not aesthetically excellent. Even as stories within the novel restart and recur, deepen and become more furrowed into the soil of the book, there is around every corner a new sentence that will stop you dead in your tracks. Take, for instance, this description of Dance:

She was like a haven for butterflies or moths rising and falling over a world of plastic white lilies, red and pink roses, lilacs, sweet peas, soft pink petals of the peonies, and shimmering blue silk delphiniums covering the dirt mound graves of the beloved, the boundlessly remembered memories of cultural infinity.

The assonance! The alliteration! The tension between those moths and the plastic epic register of flowers! All those Bs buzzing about in “the beloved, the boundlessly remembered,” the piling up of clauses, the sheer rhythm of it. Contrast that beautiful mode with the manic, self-hating space of Tommyhawk, as he watches his brother on the shore considering suicide:

He was not inhuman. He just knew how to keep a lid on beserk emotion playing tennis with his soul, bashing the ball at some rare spontaneity of guilt frog-leaping out of its house, to force him to feel obligated, to consider the meaning of family relationships, releasing a fusillade of more and more guilt asking – But isn’t he? – I mean – isn’t Aboriginal Sovereignty your brother? Shouldn’t you care about what happens to him? Whack! Whack! Tommyhawk knew that you had to whack that idea out of your brain if you wanted to rule the cruel world. Tommyhawk was good. One hundred per cent. He knew how to respond to any beckoning guilt screwballing him with its love of failure with a big flat no.

For all the novel’s peregrinations – most extensively, the grand county-wide spiral of Cause Man’s Quixotic search of untold wealth via his own fleet of Dapples – it is anchored to this scene on the beach, Aboriginal Sovereignty in despair, Tommyhawk denying his own love for his brother, the grief of the parents and the wider town, the splendid reaction of Dance’s many moths and the spirit world. Though the novel is verbally complex and often bewildering, the deep core of the novel is this simple family story, of a grief that is at first localized and then cynically seized by others for their benefit, a handy little microcosm for many eons and instances of indigenous pain. The bind of being distinct but not independent within a colonial nation filters down from a large group down to each of its atomic units; to persist under such a condition requires an incredible energy, an energy that animates this novel.

Like I said, words really have no purchase here. Just check the novel out if you’re at all interested in contemporary fiction, art, the avant-garde, the limits of language, breaking the novel, whatever’s next. Whatever animal you hope to compare the novel to, it’s something different the next time you look. (Not even a chimera works!) Conclusion is a mug’s game, since things are never quite settled, are always starting up again slightly differently, with the radical possibility that, even as the song remains the same, things could change this time around, as long as there are still oracles and muses left to speak.

---

You can get Praiseworthy at your local bookstore, local library, or online at Bookshop.org, where purchases support independent booksellers across the country. (Buying from that link also supports this newsletter.)

If you liked this post, please share it with a friend!