Review: Joy Williams on Alexis Wright

I harbor a frightened fondness for long sharky hammerhead novels—Miss Macintosh, My Darling, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Recognitions, Underworld, Novel Explosives, Almanac of the Dead … They do not suffer casual attention. They barely suffer the reader. It’s hard to imagine a more or less normal individual writing them—easier almost to imagine Kafka composing at night in his bed, his father snoring in the next room, his mother as well, possibly.

Engaging with a hammerhead piece of work requires commitment, submission, and a desire to forge new neuropathways in your brain. Hammerheads are kind of flaunty, they’re constructed oddly, their intentions are unclear, they exist for mysterious reasons. They’re not universally beloved. Plus they’re large—five, six, seven hundred pages.

I’m sure you have your own treasured, hard-won list. Maybe you want to share, maybe not. To attempt to describe a hammerhead is folly. To defend one to a doubter is a thankless enterprise. Still, one knows what one knows. Even better is to recognize and exalt that which one does not yet know.

Praiseworthy, the novel by the First Nations Australian novelist Alexis Wright, is a perfect hammerhead, a platinum hammerhead. To say that it has caused considerable excitement among American readers is a bit of an overstatement. Awe and praise might take time. Aboriginal time, country time, songline time, everywhen time.

Aboriginal Australians are believed to be the oldest continuous culture on earth, having migrated from Africa over seventy-five thousand years ago. To many white Australians they’ve been around way too long, along with their weird languages, celebrations, music (those didgeridoos!), living arrangements, and rabid devotion to the earth.

Australia hasn’t been exemplary in its colonization experiment (who has …). Industrial farming and sheep- and cattle-raising on a mostly arid continent is proving unsustainable—there’s that “over-allocation” of water issue—while introduced species—cats, rabbits, buffelgrass—are enormously destructive of the natural environment. Even the imported long-suffering donkey with its admired ability to work all day and survive on pretty much nothing has found its welcome rescinded. There are several million of them now and shooting them en masse from government helicopters seems to be ineffective, if not particularly controversial.

So there are all these problems facing modern Australia and her hapless politicians. Increasing desertification, crippling heat, feral beasts, invasive species. Too, how to deal humanely with all the peoples who were there first, those Aboriginal peoples? Less than a million of them but pesky, habitating land that doesn’t look like much but contains all kinds of metals the mining companies wish to extract. The government has proposed moving them or even assimilating them into the general populace though white Australians aren’t really on board with that. Bringing native people into the twenty-first century consists so far in providing them with fizzy drinks and bags of chips, shiny iPhones, scraps for shacks, and a reluctant, limited recognition of their rights of continuing presence.

Australia—overgrazed drought country and flashy vampire cities—is the poster-child of climate and political dysfunction, one Wright describes as “the poisonous box-jellyfish belly of reality,” a place ripe for her satirical and linguistic gifts. On every page of Praiseworthy there is a gemstone of insight, outrage, and imagination. Wright’s writing is cyclonic, indefatigable, giving rise to a language that shrieks and roars, thunders and whines—a chorus of birds, mangroves, moths, sea, and dust, as well as all things invisible. Her human figures are immense vivid metaphors. There is Ice Pick, quisling mayor of the little town of Praiseworthy, so accommodating to white thinking that he’s turned albino, his skin as milkily pink as a baby rat’s. Cause Man Steele, a.k.a. Widespread, a.k.a. Planet, is our deranged, determined head of household, who traverses the vast continent on ancient wild tracks searching for the perfect donkey that will emblemize his unique entrepreneurial vision for combating climate change, while his wife, Dance, dreamy Dance, stays at home in a cloud of endlessly becoming, endlessly dying lepidoptera. They have two sons: beautiful seventeen-year-old Aboriginal Sovereignty, imprisoned by the white government as a pedophile for marrying his childhood sweetheart, and the eight-year-old Tommyhawk, a.k.a. “the little fascist,” who wants only to be rescued and adopted by the Golden Mother, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra, a child
slewed off course even before the moment he had fallen out of his mother’s womb, and instead of breathing fresh air that contained the fullness of ev­erything of country in which to nurture possibility, he had inhaled weight—the bushfire smoke generating off great summer heat, polluted soot, ash, radioactive waste particles and micro-organisms destroying life in the lands and seas, and the dust haze of extended drought micro-waving through the atmosphere that gave him no time instead of it all.

Donkeys consume these pages as well, many thousands of them, uniformly gray, more or less unperturbed, and wise as rocks. And there are ghosts—plastic bag ghosts with their gaping mouths, furious ancestor ghosts, whale ghosts, ghost lorries, the “trucks of the international mining companies, that were being used all over the world to dig up the First Peoples’ land. What happened to mining trucks? They die. Then these ghost lorries continued to cart what they had destroyed—future, life.”

Praiseworthy is a great grave achievement, a work of excess and pummeled beauty. Toss your fusty insistence on what a novel should be, your reliance on traditional ways of access, your expectation of proper closure. Praiseworthy is other. A reading experience well worth your every eternally vanishing minute.

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Joy Williams is the author of four collections of stories, a book of essays, and five novels. Her most recent books are Harrow and Concerning the Future of Souls, coming next month. Find her other Book Post reviews here.

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