Alexis Wright's PRAISEWORTHY

Yes, he felt he was the total winner about that, his identity war, and he was truly beating Aboriginal Sovereignty hands down by fetching up his so-called ninja powers for eliminating the endless threats going bang, bang, gangbusters, from preventing his dreams from coming true. It was always a total war, and the boy pushed ahead like he had jumped from the ditches, and was already flying Qantas like a piece of war machinery that was destroying the mediocre killer drama, and the whole sick and sorry trail of far-reaching consequences that were coming to a head, to prevent him from enduring the final moments of being in his ancestral world, before he would not be long gone forever from the scene.

I was expecting a lot of things from Alexis Wright's most recent offering, Praiseworthy, which absolutely deserves every bit of the hype it's gotten but is also a very difficult read in many ways, which I'll get to. I was not, however, expecting Praiseworthy to be the best depiction I've ever encountered of what our hyper-mediated and tech-accelerated and over-connected 21st century media environment is doing to the inner lives of the young children growing up steeped in it. After all, this is a novel about an Aboriginal community in the northwest of Australia, focused on a family that lives in a house they built themselves out of whatever scrap metal and other discarded materials they presumably found in the course of doing their bit to make their town, Praiseworthy, into an award-winningly Tidy Community. 

Not exactly Neuromancer, in other words. But as that novel's author famously observed, the future is here, it just hasn't been evenly distributed yet -- only he made that observation back in the 1980s. It's now, alas and alack, the 2020s, and some of it (arguably the worst of it) finally has been distributed relatively evenly. To wit, a chubby little eight-year-old resident of Praiseworthy is running around with a government-issued iPhone, iPad and Apple watch (which he has to sneak into other people's houses to charge because his parents won't even spring for electricity because "our people survived for thousands of years" without it) and he is thus every bit a part of what has become of the internet as the Tide Pod Eaters and the Booktok Influencers Who Only Read Dialogue and the diehard adherents to QAnon.

If anyone in the town of Praiseworthy was desperately trying to get his hands on horse paste during the early days of COVID-19, it was our boy Tommyhawk Steel, is what I'm saying.

Oh, Tommyhawk, a not-quite villain of his novel. Tommyhawk, his virtual nose pressed to the virtual glass to watch the 21st century passing him by as he is stuck in a podunk town full of native hicks who have resisted assimilation into White Australia, has as warped a perspective on life as a little kid could possibly have. Someday, he is certain, a wonderful blond white lady, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, is going to arrive at the head of the Australian military to rescue Tommyhawk from Praiseworthy and its villainous, backward and 100% pedophilic population (the Australian government/media complex of the 2020s, with the willing help of Praiseworthy's mayor, is pumping out constant messaging that Aboriginal parents are uniformly incompetent bumpkins who don't really love their children and it's just a matter of time before every child they have access to gets molested, and Tommyhawk, whose media consumption (and, to a degree, his formal education ) is not being monitored by anybody who cares about him, Believes It All) and take him away to live with her in Canberra, in the glorious Parliament House, where he will be safe and loved and respected and recognized for his inherent Greatness.

Of course, Tommyhawk is wrong about everything, but the people around him, including his family, are all occupied with other matters and too busy to even notice (well, his father kind of noticed, dubbing Tommyhawk a fascist on the day the kid was born...) what a head full of wrong he's got, let alone make the effort to correct him, even about the fact that they actually do care about him.

Tommyhawk is, you see, only one of four very eccentric and passionate members of the Steel family, all of whom are very, very involved in their own shit (well, mostly donkey shit, but we'll get to that), mostly stemming from their circumstances as Aboriginal citizens of 21st century Australia.

For starters, the Steel family's house is built on a piece of land they have claimed as their share via Australia's Native Title system. Which would be pretty straightforward except the chunk of land in question happens to be Praiseworthy's long-established high tech cemetery. A cemetery equipped with live streaming cameras and other equipment so faraway relatives of the deceased can not only watch over the graves of their loved ones via the Internet but can also broadcast themselves to the cemetery and, e.g. sing to their departed ancestors at any hour of the day or night. And they do. And they can also send comments on the appearance and general condition of the grounds. And they do.

I don't participate in anything like Nextdoor but I feel like this system in Praiseworthy's cemetery is very much like a Nextdoor for a diaspora and the very thought of it gives me hives.

But it gets better. By which I mean worse. Because Tommyhawk's parents haven't just settled down to live, themselves, in the cemetery. They've also turned it into a giant sanctuary for feral donkeys. I told you we'd get to the donkeys. There's a psychedelic-looking donkey right there on the American edition's book cover. Why is there a psychedelic-looking donkey on the cover of Alexis Wright's novel, Praiseworthy?

Meet Tommyhawk's father, who goes by many names but most officially (I think) is known as Cause Man Steel. And his Cause is nothing less than the survival, nay, the thriving, of his people through the coming climate Jackpot (William Gibson again, yes), which he plans to manage from Praiseworthy by establishing a global transportation and shipping powerhouse completely independent of fossil fuels or manufactured machinery, i.e., 100% donkey powered.

Of course I'm thinking of the Underpants Gnomes. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Alexis Wright was thinking of the Underpants Gnomes. The United States' stupid pop culture has eaten the entire planet. 

But so, Cause Man Steel's plan to save the world and become, in the process, its first Aboriginal Billionaire, is: Phase One: Collect Donkeys. Phase Two: ... Phase Three: Profit (and save the world).

Except this is not in any way presented for laughs. Cause Man Steel is in absolute earnest and lives a life of anguished seeking, prompted by dreams sent by his land and his ancestors, to enact this plan and pursue its central and most crucial aim: find the God Donkey, a donkey of corporeal perfection so great that its fur is not just silvery grey, like the hundreds or even thousands of donkeys he has liberated from "neglectful" owners or just lassoed out in the desert (Australia's feral donkey problem puts the southern U.S.'s feral hog problem to shame) and brought home to Praiseworthy's cemetery, one by one, in his decrepit and sandblasted Ford Falcon but the exact hue and shininess of platinum.

You're probably already piecing this together. Tommyhawk's daddy is on a perpetual quest for the perfect donkey instead of being there to parent his son, and keeps using the barely running family car to bring failed God Donkey candidates home and turning them loose in the Internet-enabled cemetery and its environs (I mean, you don't expect feral donkeys to respect property boundaries, do you? Of course they're on the loose all over Praiseworthy, eating all the plants and pooping everywhere and kicking up clouds of dust which aren't even the only airborne hazards of life in Praiseworthy, as I'll get to.). And I mentioned that people all over the world can witness and comment on this, right? To whom are the commenters' helpful comments directed? 

Meet Tommyhawk's mother, Dance, wife of Cause Man Steel, who is sick to death of all her neighbors, actual and virtual, bitching at her about the donkeys. Her life would be nothing but being a receptacle for donkey bitching if she hadn't long ago checked out, mentally and emotionally, and cultivated a Nabokov-level obsession with moths and butterflies, an obsession that seems mutual because she is never presented in Praiseworthy without an absolute lepidopteran cloud orbiting her person. Occasionally, she notices her sons.

Oh, and she is convinced she is biracial: everybody tells her that, based on her appearance, she has at least one ancestor who was Chinese. So any issue of Native Title or anything touching on the eternally fraught question of Who Counts as Indigenous is extra complicated where she and her children are concerned. Which she doesn't think about much until circumstances in the novel force her to think about it all a whole lot.

Yes, sons, plural, because she and Cause Man also have a 17-year old, who rejoices in the name that is absolutely reflective of his father's priorities, but feels almost like it exists solely to provide the second two-thirds of the novel with a bitterly funny running joke, Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel. Ab.Sov to his friends and girlfriend, from whom he has recently been separated because she is a few years younger than he is, and by some reckonings, this makes poor Ab.Sov a pedophile. So, you know, Tommyhawk's big brother doesn't have much time for him either.

All of this is to say that, Tommyhawk Steel is a very, very unpleasant Eric Cartman of a kid, but, even more than Cartman, one who makes sense as a product of his environment and  is a tragically funny (until he's not) little asshole of a character, who is but one of the novel's two main antagonists. 

I feel like I've given away too much already so I'm not going to talk much about the other, the albino mayor of Praiseworthy, who is very much on board with the effort to force his people to Assimilate and in general get with the global economic exploitation program and seems to be spending most of his time trying and failing to put a stop to Operation Donkey God and maybe just put Cause Man in jail or something.

Nor have I much discussed the big problem literally hanging over the heads of every adult, child and donkey living in Praiseworthy, a mysterious and persistent atmospheric haze that yes, per the great Brian Wood*, is strongly reminiscent of Don DeLillio's Airborne Toxic Event except in that it's been there for years and is actually visible. The haze is introduced right at the novel's beginning as the likely ultimate source of the community's woes but its menace and effect are quickly overshadowed by those of the town's two most powerful internal enemies, Mayor Ice Pick (yes, that is his name) and Tommyhawk Steel.

The voluntary searchers who had never before wished to be elsewhere in their lives except being on country now felt their time immemorial beings jeopardized, by knowing this kind of little fascist was not dreaming ancient homeland dreams, and this made them feel as though their sanity was being stolen, and that they too had been placed in some jeopardy departure lounge of a busy international terminal, the subnormal monstrosity of unnaturalness that they had never before managed to imagine in their holy-place mind, and all this foreign mind transporting stuff happened just by watching the way the kid was prancing around like a caged animal in their aired zone airstrip cut through stripped land, where even they, who had never been to a city, were now impatiently pacing while channeling anyone for the sake of just saying hello, and checking for non-existent incoming and outgoing flights bundled in the blue sky, and expecting a call from somebody calling the scenario glistening in a sunray and oh! My god, it was not even the mother, Mother, or the White Mother calling.

The above is how this novel depicts a scene in its last third or so, in which an even more agitated and impatient Tommyhawk is pacing back and forth alongside Praiseworthy's makeshift airstrip, jabbering into his iPhone, while most of the rest of the town has been mobilized to search for Tommyhawk's missing older brother. And, given said brother's highly idiosyncratic name, Aboriginal Sovereignty, it's a big question, sentence by sentence, whether what's being discussed in phrases like "their missing Aboriginal Sovereignty" is the person or the concept. And is the mother being discussed currently Tommyhawk's actual mother, Dance Steel, or is it the faceless bureaucrat in charge of Aboriginal affairs for the Australian government? Etc.

All of this is to say that Alexis Wright does some wild things with English prose even allowing for the presence of Australian slang terms and the very, very broad and flexible range of meanings Aboriginal communities on Australia impart to seemingly ordinary and straightforward words like "country."

Wright's style also very effectively mimics a much older form of storytelling than a maximalist (did I mention that Praiseworthy is over 700 pages long? Well, it is) 21st century novel: a bedtime or campfire story, told in chunks over many nights, each time handing off the narrative duties to a new Oracle (which is often more than one being) and circling back to remind listeners/readers of where we last left all the characters physically, emotionally and spiritually before nudging the plot along a bit with something new. Furthermore, the narrative itself seems to be built around the idea that all of its reader/listeners witnessed the original events and are as much being reminded as told about them, so a lot of what we might call plot elements either happen offscreen or don't seem to actually happen at all. And sometimes the facts seem to differ, sometimes substantially; we are, after all, getting multiple perspectives on evernts. For example, suddenly the volunteer force looking for Ab.Sov has swollen from a handful of fishermen to a crowd of maybe thousands? But we aren't told when this happened or how. It's just suddenly so. You learn to roll with it. Or you don't. But it's better if you do. 

This has caused some readers to fuss that Praiseworthy is too long and bloated with all of that repetition and if all you ever read is tightly plotted genre fiction, you'll probably think so, too, unless you go into this with consciously different expectations. This isn't a soap opera or an action-packed adventure, not a social novel, nor, precisely, a character study. It's very much its own thing. And I'm not sure right now what to call that thing, but I like it.

*Chad Post and Brian Wood devoted an entire season of the consistently great Two Month Review podcast to Praiseworthy. Go listen to hear these insights and much more!