Gordon, a 25-year-old chain-smoking asthmatic who unhappily works at a Brisbane bottle shop, moves into a run-down residential hotel.

[3] Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times wrote Praise "is uncanny and sizzling because it has the apparently aimless feel of a bad love affair of youth, the kind of story you would overhear the thoughtless Gordon telling somebody; you would move your chair closer to catch every seamy, and often hilarious, detail.

"[4] TV Guide reviewed the filmed positively and said, "McGahan's novel was compared to Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero in its depiction of anomic slackers numbing themselves with drugs and impersonal sex.

But Charles Bukowski's pickled oeuvre is the better comparison; McGahan and filmmaker John Curran lack Ellis's delusions of glamour and their tour of the low life is sordid without being exploitative, coolly compassionate without in any way glossing over Gordon and Cynthia's crippling personal deficiencies.

"[5] Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "Praise is fun and strange, yet remarkably warm in its look at characters who let their hearts out of the bag as unwitting acts of salvation and, at the same time, self-destruction.