★ 11/27/2023
This freewheeling and heartbreaking masterpiece from Aboriginal Australian author Wright (Carpenteria ) brims with the magic of myth and the painful realities of present-day climate change. An “ochre-coloured haze” has descended on the remote town of Praiseworthy, Australia, “claiming ultimate sovereignty of the flatlands” and portending ecological disaster. A man variously known as Widespread, Planet, and Cause Man Steel comes up with a harebrained and quixotic plan for surviving the future. Based on a dream he once had, it involves an “empire” of “super-charged donkeys that were fit for a super-charged climate.” Meanwhile, Widespread’s elder son, Aboriginal Sovereignty, who’s distraught after having been accused of raping the underage girl he’s in love with (she’s only 18 months younger), considers suicide. Widespread’s younger son, Tommyhawk, whom his father calls a “born fascist,” hopes his brother follows through on his plan and thereby avoid a public trial that would upset Tommyhawk’s desire to assimilate into white society. Rounding out the cast is Dance Steel, Widespread’s wife, who’s “like a haven for butterflies or moths” because she speaks “the moths’ frequency, a language of millennia which she had learnt in dreams which were only ever about butterflies and moths.” At once lush and relentless, Wright’s looping tale combines magical realism, absurdism, and maximalism in a rich depiction of contemporary Aboriginal life. This is unforgettable. (Feb.)
"Wright gives us the living and the dead, material and non-material, Country and people; all the masters dreamed of, and all they neglected to; the entire human (and non-human) comedy. The sense is of Country cheerfully accommodating everything: high and low, chaos and epiphany, farce and deep time. Long after the lesser concerns of contemporary fiction have ceased to matter, the work of Alexis Wright will remain."
The Guardian (Australia) - Declan Fry
"Alexis Wright's Praiseworthy should be the last novel ever published: it's the ultimate expression of what fiction can do, a marvelous beast that gobbles and spits up all genres; whispers and screams and moans in all registers; and the vision of our world that it casts back in its distorted funhouse mirror seems more real than piddling reality itself. "
"A book you don’t so much read but experience and inhabit ... Praiseworthy says plenty worth saying, perhaps in the only way it could be said. Praiseworthy indeed."
"An abundant odyssey that contains a formidable vision of Australia’s future. This is a long journey through the imagination, a novel both urgent and deeply contemplated…The rich interrelations of ancestral spirits, larger-than-life characters, and Country all derive from the Aboriginal traditions of storytelling. But there are also signs of literary influence from every compass point on the map, including, most notably, the surrealism and magic realism of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez."
"I’m immersed in the incendiary beauty of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy , a monumental novel that documents ecological catastrophe and Aboriginal lives in blistering prose."
The New Statesman - Preti Taneja
"A deeply contemplated novel concerned with issues of sovereignty, ongoing colonisation and climate change that is both timely and urgent. Praiseworthy is simultaneously satirical, comic, and lyrical. A work of stunning exhilarating sentences that builds to an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal storytelling, lore, and sovereignty."
judges’ comments Queensland Literary Awards
"[An] extraordinary novel … which reveals an Australia where myth and reality meet."
BBC Radio Four, Open Book - Chris Power
"I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of Wright’s work: she is vital on the subject of land and people."
The New York Times Book Review - Robert Macfarlane
"A trippy, mind-blowing, allegorical, and powerfully political book, Praiseworthy takes you to another world (the small titular town of Praiseworthy , suffering under a haze cloud and under racism), and makes that world real and makes you care deeply. "
"There are few books in Australian literature more epic than Praiseworthy and few books as dense with poetry."
The Saturday Paper - Claire G. Coleman
"Praiseworthy is Alexis Wright’s most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet. A hero’s journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty. . . Wright has surpassed herself—Praiseworthy is the thing itself."
The Conversation - Jane Gleeson-White
"Wright has already proved herself one of Australia’s deepest and most urgent thinkers. In her new novel Praiseworthy , she synthesises the themes and forms of her past work—including Carpentaria, The Swan Book and Tracker—and arrives at a furious and dense epic satirising white Australia’s ongoing attacks on the colonised."
The Guardian (Australia) - Steph Harmon
"Praiseworthy is classic Wright: a book made of beautiful, mutable and playful language. . . These seven hundred-odd pages are chock full of stunning, exhilarating sentences that lead you around by the nose, taking you to some very unexpected places. Wright stretches sentences to their limits; when you think you’re over one sentence, sick of it even, you land on the most satisfying note."
Sydney Review of Books - Mykaela Saunders
"Thoroughly original and refreshingly honest."
"Incandescent… Praiseworthy suggests what would be lost were assimilation to succeed: vital knowledge for the future of humankind gleaned from the ‘biggest library in the world – country.’ Yet its anguished elegy is offset by a confidence in survival, born of a long view of tens of thousands of years."
The Guardian - Maya Jaggi
"Praiseworthy blew me away…If you think you know what assimilation is, you should read Praiseworthy and think again."
"The layering of time and the riot of language are Wright’s great themes and raw materials, and in “Praiseworthy” — the most ambitious and accomplished Australian novel of this century — they twist and shimmer, doomed forever to their violent pas de deux."
The New York Times Book Review - Samuel Rutter
"An impassioned environmental Ulysses of the Northern Territory. Playful, formally innovative, multi-storied, allegorical, protean and dizzyingly exhilarating, it is long, lyrical and enraged—James Joyce crossed with Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Chatwin and Arundhati Roy."
The Spectator - Ruth Padel
"Like opera, Wright’s writing operates in many modes, not just satirical, but comedic, lyrical, absurd, a lament, a screed, a manifesto, and often within paragraphs or even sentences that wind on like the lines of migrating butterflies that flit through the novel. . . It is one of the most exhilarating reading experiences I can imagine."
The Library is Open - James Whitmore
2023-10-25
Set in a small town in northern Australia sometime in the 21st century, this novel tells the story, in a fabulist mode teeming with plotlines and ancestral presences, of an Indigenous family’s response to climate catastrophe and longstanding abuse and neglect by a colonial power. Over roughly 700 pages, we track the fates of four central characters as a disorienting, lethal haze settles over their community. Cause Man Steel, the patriarch, becomes engaged in a manic quest to round up millions of feral donkeys as replacements for carbon-based transportation. His wife, Dance, plots an escape to China while enduring her community’s suspicions about her racial authenticity. Aboriginal Sovereignty, the elder son, disappears after embarking on an illicit romance which seems to confirm the prejudices of white culture. Tommyhawk, the younger son, plunges into an internet obsession and rejects both his family and his Aboriginal heritage in favor of the promises of government authorities. A dizzying range of storytelling modes are employed as the plot unfolds; the overall narrative may be thought of as something like a traditional songline or dreaming track, but it includes sections reminiscent of Western genres as disparate as science fiction, classical myth, romance, and melodrama. Among the insistent themes, which reverberate in sometimes startling ways, are the ongoing consequences of historical trauma on a colonized people and the failure of a settler culture to confront its ongoing culpability—and commit to reconciliation—in good faith. If one can keep up with the demands of this challenging book, the rewards are undeniable; what emerges at last is a shimmering vision of the legacy of colonialism in Australia, and the reasons for optimism in hoping for greater justice and autonomy for its Indigenous peoples.
A rich, dream-like journey through an Aboriginal mythos.
