A protracted allegory about Aboriginal Sovereignty both as a concept and a character in the story.

Planet Widespread AKA Cause Man Steel is the father of the troubled family central to the epic set in north AUS. As a smog of climate pollution gathers over their titular town, many of the aboriginals take it to be a bad omen of the impending climate apocolypse, including Steel who decides that in the aftertimes, all electricity/energy infrastructure writ large will be destroyed. To get ahead of the market curve he goes on a quest to assemble a transportation conglomerate comprised of donkeys – becoming particularly obsessed with a perfectly platinum/silver Christ donkey which appeared to him in a vision. He basically fucks off from his family for this adventure.

Planet is convinced that the haze is the harbinger of the climate disaster to come.

His family is all neurotic in their own ways. His son Aboriginal Sovereignty is like A Boy Named Sue, who eventually (very slowly, takes half the book) walks out to sea to kill himself. In the back half of the book, his becomes transparently allegorical for Australian/white government efforts to integrate (read: culturally steamroll) Praiseworthy.

Due to the conflicts with his wife, Dance – who is obsessed with moths and butterflies, over the overly-symbolic name of their first born who immediately suffers identity crises which drive him to the point of suicide, Cause gives up on naming the second child as says "call him whatever, probably some stupid white American name like Tommyhawk" [sic, probably thinking of the skateboarder]. Likely as a result of being ignored/disregarded by his father, Tommyhawk seeks emotional investment online and becomes terminally online, basically getting one-shotted by various pipelines into thinking that all adults, especially Praiseworthy adults, are fascist pedophiles out to get him specifically (this is not improved by the Australian government peddling statistics about crime rates unique to aboriginal communities such as theirs). Tommyhawk believes his father to be the very ringleader of the pedophile cabal. He also believes his older brother to be a pedophile and so all the while that Ab-Sov is walking into the ocean, eight year old Tommyhawk is secretly watching from the shore urging him to hurry up and get it over with. When Ab-Sov does finally die, TH is insistent on getting out of Praiseworthy (escaping with dignity, something his brother was incapable of doing). Ironically, Tommyhawk is a little fascist himself, placing utter faith in the white saviors he sees in the Australian government responsible for acclimating the aboriginal communities. Unable to discern the contagion of the virus of pedophilia in any adults as labeled by said government, he deems it safest to view all adults as such.

Cause Man, then, finds himself in the tricky position of thinking that his child is a fascist for persistently trying to report his family to the oppressive white man, but is also afraid of properly disciplining his child for fear of the optics of looking like the very sort of brutish savage that the government (and Tommyhawk) are paining aboriginals out to be.

Part of Ab-Sov's suicide is tied to his vilifaction of being so-charged as a pedophile (at first thought to just be Tommyhawk's loose-lipped accusations) because of his relationship with a 17year old while he was 18 which is nothing out of the ordinary (in aboriginal society or otherwise a la Romeo e Juliet).

Praiseworthy, like The High Heaven kind of overstays its welcome. It doesn't get boring or dull per se in any given location or section of the book, but I felt like I got "the gist" or the value out of the books well before it was over. It is a sweeping epic, with rich imagery of the Australian planes. Great job of blending modern crises with indigenous culture with dry Pynchonian humor and horror.

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