How do you talk about a novel so massive, so voluble, so amplified by eagerness to speak for itself? Part of me is tempted to say: let it. Let it relate, tell, inform, scold, witness, bear whoever attempts it. First Nations literature in colonial countries is too often spoken for, or over. Let it speak already! (My ideal festival scenario: host angles their microphone not toward the author but their book, propped upon the marquee chair, inviting it to relate its story; the festival audience nods sagely, relieved for once to find themselves in the presence of someone so insightful about their own work.)
The Miles Franklin award-winning author Alexis Wright’s new novel is set in the Aboriginal community it is named for, Praiseworthy, a “prize-winning tidy town” caught in an era of great untidiness: its “coffin-choked land” filled with asbestos homes and “cruelty chic”, the “tumbledown life of poverty” periodically interrupted by “endless spite Twittering” – “the big-ticket underbelly of shrilly-dilly blame-calling”. As in all Wright’s work, Praiseworthy depicts cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent characters struggling against cruel, unjust, hypocritical and violent circumstances: a realist’s view of colonisation, in short.
