Praise

by Andrew McGahan

This remarkable novel from a young writer of exceptional talent won the prestigious Vogel Award as the best Australian first novel of 1991. Praise is a stunningly frank and darkly humorous story about being young in a world where drugs and alcohol dominate, where sex scalds and soothes, where welfare is an easier alternative than working, where survival means taking nothing and no one too seriously. Gordon is a young man whose libido is awakened only to leave him emotionally torn between the woman who has his body and the woman to whom he'd give his soul. Andrew McGahan allows these characters to conduct their mating dance to a tune performed with mordant humor. This is an astonishingly honest story about male sexuality - including the fears and the misogny as well as the possibilities.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Literature, Contemporary, 20th Century, Novels, Literary Fiction

297 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Andrew McGahan (b. 1966) was an Australian novelist, best known for his first novel Praise, and for his Miles Franklin Award-winning novel The White Earth. His novel Praise is considered to be part of the Australian literary genre of grunge lit.

Reviews

[zed · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently read and reviewed The Delinquents by Criena Rohan .
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

As I wrote in that review Brisbane being the location was a lure for my read. As was this book Praise by the late Andrew McGahan. The Delinquents is a love story about 2 teens in the 1950’s. Brisbane was a much changed city by the time McGahan’s Praise was released in 1992, exactly thirty year later than Rohans view of the street. Praise is no love story between a pair of rebellious teens. Praise is a very sparse and gritty story of an individual alienated totally with life. I suspect that this kind of social realism will not be popular with most but has hit the spot with me as I do recall knowing individuals such as protagonist Gordon Buchanan, people who just did not fit no matter what, people who were tired of having to think too hard about what it was they really wanted and what it was that society wanted from them.

Gordon comes from Dalby, a two and half hour drive west from Brisbane. Dalby is the quintessential rural Queensland town, deeply white, conservative and religious. Large families abound with well-meaning parents who tend towards a rural outlook with a friendly attitude but a fear of outsiders and change. I worked with a man who was homosexual who came from Dalby and he had no choice but to move as coming out would have been a disaster for him and his family. Author McGahan is from Dalby as is his character Gordon. I wonder if there is a little bit of the author in Gordon. Gordon left Dalby and wandered into pub work in Brisbane. He eventually left that to go on the dole and with that fell into the sparse world of boarding house living, unenjoyable sex and unenjoyable drugs. He occasionally attempted to be a poet but found his own poetry a chore.

The difference from The Delinquents 30 years prior is stark. Set In the fifties and situated not long after the troops came home from WW2. The young protagonists of that book, Lola and Brownie were, for all their trials and tribulations, mostly optimistic about their future. Gordon seems to be a character that had no skerrick of optimism, the ultimate member of the No Future generation. With that author McGahan makes this feeling of nothingness work superbly well with a narrative led tale that suits the lack of warmth in any of the characters that appear in the book.

One final thought. With The Delinquents released in 1962 and Praise in 1992 will there be a Brisbane novel of the streets released in 2022 and as thematic? I hope so. Sparse and grungy this is a great Brisbane book.

[dianne b. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Classified as “grunge lit”, this book seems written by someone post lobotomy, traumatically severed neural connections. Really, there is no past that explains the shallow nihilism and hatred. And the future is a joke. This story of drugs and alcohol and ridiculous sex all used not to blunt pain or decrease anxiety or, really, anything connected to life. It seems this vacuous, vocab impaired narrator is simply trying to feel something, anything.
It doesn’t work. We don’t know why, and frankly, Scarlett, I soon didn’t give a damn.

At least it’s short.

“‘What about venereal diseases?” I asked. “Have you ever caught one? You must’ve at some stage. All those men.’
‘No.’
‘Have you ever checked?’
‘No.’
And I had to admire that. She was heading for death a lot faster than I was.”

Now, there’s a selling point.

[Amy Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started this at the start of the silly season and it made me drive to the Brunswick hotel bws for a bottle of a scotch. It’s so rare that I read books set in Brisbane and when I do it’s so bizarre. I can’t imagine being from a city like New York or London and having so many books and so many OLD books set it your city. I finished the book after a 4 day bender and the bleakness of its conclusion made me not want to drink again so that was well-timed.

Praise reads like a first novel which is great because it is. McGahan kept doing the thing and white earth is so brilliant and mature even tho it’s narrator is 15 years younger.

Anyways I liked it for a grimey early twenties fuckeyed novel. The end

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

The grunge fiction Gen X writers got so hung up about did get a little stale after a while. However, if there was ever a seminal piece of Australian grunge fiction, this would be my pick. This book should hit a few nerves for anyone who has lived through a time of crummy share housing, excess cask wine and flaky relationships. For me, it's the dark counterpart to 'He Died With a Falafel in His Hand' and just as good.

[Sue Gerhardt Griffiths · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grunge lit at its finest

Set in Brisbane in the 1990s

Loosely based on the author’s life.

When I read The White Earth I knew I was going to read another one of Andrew McGahan’s novels and I chose Praise as it was the authors first novel and he won an award for it.

5 stars for Andrew McGahan’s writing style not because I loved this book.

Hard to love when its content contains sex, drugs and booze. ON ALMOST EVERY PAGE. The sex is described in graphic detail. I wanted to skim those sections but then I would have been left with a five page book 😂

Remember the good ol’ days when you drove around in your Kingswood, drank Lambrusco and smoked Winfield Blue, when life was easy, and you and everybody else had a job? Gordon’s life was all that but minus a job. He’s a young asthmatic man with absolutely no ambitions, wandering aimlessly through life…

Then there is Cynthia…batshit crazy, ill, anxious, Cynthia. A nymphomaniac with values and goals akin to Gordon’s.

The characters are perplexing and odd.

The dialogue is unparalleled.

Praise is crass, blunt, dysfunctional and demanding.

It’s also powerful, honest and thought-provoking.


Yeah ok, you got me…I loved it!

[Ailsa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I wasn't so uncomfortable with drink driving that I wouldn't let someone else do it. We took my car, Cynthia behind the wheel, and drove to the nearest bottle shop. We pulled up and the boy came over. I felt for him. I knew how hateful customers became after a while. They disturbed the peace." 11

Published in 1992 and still gross enough to be gag-inducing. The most un-sexy sex scenes ever written. A small novel, I liked it overall.
Sidenote: I wish centrelink (Australian dole) was as easy to access now as it was back then. I've tried to become a dole-bludger, it's easier just to get a job than deal with the hassle. Pre-2000's Australia truly was the lucky country.

[Misrabelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I borrowed it from my high school library when I was in 7th or 8th grade. Characters got on my nerves a fair bit, but the setting was so far removed from anything I had seen in my own young and sheltered life, that I stuck with it.
Can't remember if I ever finished it though....

Mum found it, while snooping in my room one day, went to the high school principal to complain about the content being unsuitable for children and it was immediately removed from the library collection.

[Eszter Faatima Sabiq · Rating 4 out of 5]

Profane, philosophic, dirty, intelligent, at times suffocating, in one word: brilliant. A voice from the lost generations of Australia.

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Praise is an utterly frank and darkly humorous novel about being young in the Australia of the 1990s.”

The above is according to Allen and Ulwin and requires, I think, a little translation; ‘frank’ means there is a lot of sex and ‘utterly’ that the sex in question is not always very pleasant so if you are not used to reading about sex it may be a bit confrontational at times. I wish I could translate the ‘darkly humorous’ however at no point did I find any humour at all in the novel, so you are on your own there.

I did actually read this novel many years ago, when I was newly back in Australia and enthusiastic about re-immersing myself in anything Australian. I found it depressing and mystifying at the time and I had forgotten that I had read it. Reading it again, the main characters are still aimless and messed up; it is still more than a little depressing and the ending is still as meaningless as it was the first time around.


With a better understanding of Australia, I do see why it won awards (aside from the fact that Australian awards committees’ looooove depressing novels, witness The Hand That Signed The Paper). The characters are vivid and their world experience gritty as well as squalid, it is based in a town and culture that has seen little enough literary exposure even today, let alone on the 1990’s. btw, I really enjoyed reading a novel set in Brisbane, QLD and the 90’s. Still depressing though.

oh, also, I did not read the kindle, I have and read the 2005 paperback edition, but it had not been added to goodreads and I did not have enough care factor to get it added.

[Kathryn Koromilas · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been very difficult reading this book now. For one thing, Andrew McGahan is dead now. He was three years older than me. My relationship with book authors gets rather “personal.” I have always been interested in the real person behind the words on the page. “Praise” was pitched as a “semi-autobiographical” novel and that, of course, appealed to me. Still appeals to me. Of course, as a writer, I know what it means to tease autobiographical elements into a fiction. Facts and figures might differ, but true deep down truth emerges in a surprising and more universal way.

I was writing at the time that McGahan had "Praise" published and I used to dream of finishing a novel that would win the Australian/Vogel Literary Award that McGahan won for “Praise.” It was an award for writers under 35.

The novel itself fascinated me. The writing is straightforward and honest—I didn’t know I could write like that—I was naive in many ways back then. The characters are unambitious, hopeless—Gordon, asthmatic, unemployed, unopinionated, and so easily swept up and open to influence; Cynthia, ill and anxious and insecure and suffering. When I first read "Praise" I remember having a strong dislike for Cynthia—it was not just the eczema, but the intimacy of Gordon's body with Cynthia's bleeding, flaking body. All I could see was their bed covered in skin and blood. I also found her very aggressive—sexually, of course, obviously, but even mentally and emotionally. This reading, however, I was much kinder to Cynthia—she's a complex character (aren't we all) in the way that the young are complex—or rather, messy, inconsistent, life-experimenters, students.

The novel, given that it is based in a very real Brisbane of the time, early Nineties, was fun to read for the quirky facts, and brand names, and jargon, and the like. Fun things about the novel was just reading about the Australia (and specifically, the Queensland/Brisbane) of the time. The Kingswood! Also, Tooheys Old, a dark ale Aussie beer. The beer I drank in the early Nineties at the Golden Barley, the pub opposite where I lived in Newtown. A time when you talked for hours or played Scrabble; when you dated someone and fell in love after meeting them at work, not on an app; a time when porn meant magazines or mail order. But most of this was foreign to me. Apart from the odd Tooheys Old, I was busy studying and acting and working and achieving. No drugs. No lying around doing nothing all day. And, not on the dole. Fun to read about the CES pre-Howard years... Made me think of how drastically things changed only a few years later (McGahan does predict this) when Howard won the election in 1996. By 1997, the whole department of employment and immigration had changed, budget slashed, and Australia changed forever.

All in all, still a good story to read. At the time, especially, when “grunge” was the new voice. But beyond the genre, this is a touching, sensitive, honest, and very personal story. Gordon writes poetry, has a small penis, has a very low sex drive, has a low drive for everything, doesn’t realise how cute he is, but he was a writer—the kind of boy I tended to like in those days.

[Lewis Woolston · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know what life was like for my generation of Australians who grew up in the 1990's then this book nails it. The listlessness, the idleness, the almost total lack of direction, the dead end minimum wage jobs, the friends who went to Uni but never really got anywhere with it, the casual relationships, the default use of alcohol and drugs as all purpose entertainment and medication. It's all here written down in grungy, smoke haze detail.
This book takes me back to my youth so perhaps I have a more emotional reaction to it than other people. All the same I think it's worth reading.

[Declan Melia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mr. McGahan’s Praise is unoriginal, crass, and off-putting. It’s also one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in a while.

The first chapter sees Gordon -- an unpublished poet in his early twenties “living” in Brisbane – quitting his job at a bottle shop. This is a level of ambition he retains pretty steadily throughout the novel’s next twelve months (despite the career change, he does manage to retain a close proximity to alcohol). The storyline, if there is a storyline, loosely follows his tempestuous romance with Cynthia, a neurotic nymphomaniac with similar life aspirations to Gordon, and by far the crowning achievement of Mr. McGahan’s novel. They drink (which isn’t described in much detail) have sex (which is) and occasionally socialise.

There are many cross references here. The most obvious is Bukowski, however there isn’t quite so much poetry in the writing here, we very rarely get a sense of what Gordon wants in life (even if all he wants is nothing). There’s also a lot of Easton Ellis here, though there’s nothing so shocking, we get the sense of the ennui of youth, but its’ traded off as a bit of good old fashioned Australian non-direction. Something McGahan probably could have explored (and, hopefully, criticised, more than he did). We get it, the youth of today are nihilistic. That hasn’t been shocking since Dostoyevsky wrote about it. Finally, there’s Irvine Welsh, with plenty of freaky sex scenes and intravenous drug use, though, once again, it’s never really taken to its jaw-dropping outer edges. That’s fine. Life is sometimes less extreme then Welsh makes out and there was a very real (and, it should be added, not disagreeable sense) that McGahan was writing from experience. Of course, to be able to trace the authorial lineage does not have the effect of totally damning McGahan, but there is a sense that all of the above-mentioned authors do it better. Why read a watered-down Australian version when you could go to the source?

Nevertheless, this book was still great fun to read. The chapters are short, sharp breaths, guiding you along without allowing you to spot the real narrative snaps. Like real life, the changes in this book happen behind your back. It’s occasionally funny and (very) occasionally insightful, but, more than anything, this is a page turner.

A bit like a Saints song, this has its charms. But doesn’t it make you miss the real thing?

[Courtney Perry · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was just total filth and will be going in the trash

[Zora · Rating 5 out of 5]

One for the ages

[Nadia Patterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Praise is dirty, disgusting, unfiltered and gritty. It’s one of my favourites.

[Amber Asmara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book a long time ago, about the time it was released. I would have been just into my 20s. It made a strong impression and it was iconic. I read it again within the past 5 years and found it hard to believe it was the same book. I certainly saw the characters and the plot a bit differently.

The first time I read it, I remembered it as a story about being on the dole (unemployment benefits), feeling uncertain and depressed about the future, but also finding love in an unlikely lover. When I reread it the banal boredom and lack of ambition made me sneer a little. While the girl seemed manipulative, selfish, almost cruel and somehow not as lost as he was.

It was the first book, almost one of the few books, I've read, where sex was a way the female character used to deal with physical pain, and perhaps also inner tumult. They were having sex cause they were both available, not because they were in love or crazy about each other physically.

I think it gave me a negative impression of Brisbane suburbia. But perhaps an intrigue into living on the edge, barely living at all, being a young person doing the opposite of what is expected, yet is more the experience of young adulthood for many, compared to the glamourised version one sees on tv and what one may dream of.

Dirty realism, dystopia, and original in content at the time.

[Stanley Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling and relevant novel to this day. McGahan really captures the self torture of a young Brisbanite growing up in a share house setting, surrounded by drugs, booze and cigarettes, a real relatable story for so many young people in Queensland’s all to small capitol. His cold humour and precise sentence structure create a relatable and accessible experience for readers, leaving a lasting taste in your mouth that some may find hard to swallow but is brilliant nonetheless.
Praise’s characters voices are easy to track and reflect on nihilistic parts of the human experience that we have all lived at at least one point in our adolescence and deliver in such a way that is gritty yet humorous, making it accessible for all readers, despite any anxieties they may hold towards their own darkest thoughts.
I was leant this book by a good friend and it sat on my shelf for a year, behind a long line of books I already wanted to read. I figured I had held onto it long enough, and my friend deserved it back, and it took me two days to read. I was gripped immediately.

[Marnie87 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've just re-read this in a weekend after reading the sad news that Andrew McGahan has died. Wow. If anything I think it is easier to appreciate it now, when the fad for grunge has passed and it can't be lazily summed up as "just another" example of its type. It's relentless and sad, with flashes of wry humour. Somehow McGahan creates a feeling that things are moving forward swiftly and inevitably for Gordon and Cynthia, even when on the surface of things not a lot is happening. And it conjures up so palpably its settings - I haven't read anything in ages that makes you smell, hear and taste its world so sharply, all without seeming to expend many words at all on ornate descriptions.

[Zoe Deleuil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up and started reading, then couldn't put it down after last reading it years ago.

The debut, Vogel-award winning novel of the late Andrew McGahan, loosely based on his own life in Brisbane as an aimless 20-something, living in a boarding house with a bunch of old men, drinking and smoking and wondering what to do with his life. Into this torpor arrives Cynthia, a loud, passionate heartbreaking young woman and the two of them launch into a brief, messy relationship.
And that's more or less it.

But I loved it - so much energy, such a raw, honest voice and so evocative of the 90s in that time just before the internet changed everything. What a talent.

[Kate Cornfoot · Rating 4 out of 5]

How have I missed Andrew McGahan in all my years of reading?!! I loved this book. Yes, it's depressing and dysfunctional and sometimes, I wanted to wring the main character's neck! But it's also an incredible snapshot of youth/drug culture in Brisbane in the 90s. The dialogue is phenomenal. The characters are complex and weird and annoying but real and at times, truly loveable. I'm really glad I read it.

[Tash Bredhauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book stands out to me with its unapologetically raw take on the conflict between desire and destruction. It creates a sense of familiarity with the reader despite the differences we may have with Gordon and Cynthia. Very interesting and comforting to see Brisbane written from this perspective. Side note: my dad had dinner with Andrew before he passed and said he was a lovely man who used his asthma puffer as much as Gordon.

[Danielle Warby · Rating 2 out of 5]

This feels 'real' for me having come of age in the 90s but the women are so two dimensional. Not surprising. Does anyone have any recommendations for a similar book authored by a woman? Think Monkey Grip for the 90s.

[in8 · Rating 2 out of 5]

http://www.5cense.com/18/590.htm

[Indrani Ganguly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, tho after a while I started skipping the prolonged sex scenes. Seemed to be a bit of a boy’s book.

[Eleanor · Rating 3 out of 5]

insane...doing heroine because you can't get lsd.

[Gabriella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Filthy sex-obsessed white male autofiction from down under, replete with fresh 90s Australian vocabulary, vivid drug experiences, and philosophical musings on the point of it all. Wildly entertaining and surprising in its self-mockery and emphasis on how the ugly half live. If you’re game for hetero relationship quibbles between a small-dicked ugly loafer and a bleeding-skinned ugly barmaid, come in, the water’s fine, things don’t get nearly as ugly as you’d fear from having seen too many Larry Clark films. And our antihero has a point - is paradise living off the dole and the junk and endless casks of cheap wine? Or if not, paradise, simply “a way to live”? Ditto the whole working life rigamarole - a tidy office job might in the end be an even better offer of care and support than the dream of three square meals and your own bed in an institution… I don’t think I’ve ever been more turned on by ugliness, what an absolute treat. Just the guttural 90s slacker slut fantasy read I needed at this monogamous and tame moment in life.

[Darcy Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much apathy and so much sex. I’m now apathetic to sex.

[Robnrel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I feel as though a book, a film, a band or an album, comes to you at the time it will serve you best. I should have read ‘Praise’ in 1992, when it came out, but for reason’s known only to the universe, it wanted me to read it in 2023. A beat up copy called to me at a Market Stall in Fitzroy, on a weekend away with my crew. I eagerly devoured it. It was everything it had promised to be. Do I identify with any of the characters? Not a bit. Did I like any of the characters? Not a bit. But is that necessary? Not a bit. I loved the honesty, the apathy, the vileness, the blind obsession of youth, the frittering away of time as if it is endless, the way everything matters and yet nothing matters. Whether I read this when I was 19 in 92’ or now as a 50 year old in 23’, the same truths remain, these people are nothing like me, their lifestyle holds zero appeal, but these kinds of stories and this style of writing will always draw me to them.

[Phoebe Cannan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved some of McGahan's later novels, e.g. The White Earth. This book won the Vogel award so I was ready to be impressed. I bought a copy for $2 from a book fridge in a caravan park at White Cliffs and read it while I was camping in the moonscape of the outback near Tibooburra. It was compelling, raw, nihilistic and gruesomely detailed about sex. I hated the ending which went nowhere. The protagonist Gordon, reminded me a little of Michael Dransfield without his poetic brilliance.

[IdiotHeadMan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know why I enjoyed this book. It was thoroughly entertaining, despite the mundane existence of some characters. For someone who barely reads any fiction, I quite enjoyed it. Time to do some soul searching for as to why this book spoke to me...