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calla351's review against another edition
4.0
It’s hard to know how I feel about this one. It’s ballsy, and it’s occasionally wonderful, and I think it captures a mood and a person better than maybe anything I’ve read. It might be as far as you can possibly go in a stream-of-consciousness style. But I’d be lying if I didn’t also find it frustrating, and maybe far too long, and sometimes meandering to the point of meaninglessness. I really wanted to like this book, and by the end I think I did, even if the ending felt a bit out of nowhere, but I can’t imagine I’ll read it again. It’s a real portrait of a mind, aa very open and empathetic read, but it was a hard one.
manek_m's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
halvy4's review against another edition
5.0
The first of Mike's Big Books 2021. If they all take this long it might be one of only two or three. You never realize how much space paragraph breaks and dialogue take up in a book until you read a book completely lacking them. Also contains very prominent Ohio representation, which we must love and respect in all forms.
An exercise in style first and foremost, this novel with the exception of interludes takes the form of one long sentence, broken up only by "the fact thats," consisting mostly of the internal monologue and word associations of an unnamed Ohio housewife. It never plunges into full nonsensical digression like Joyce would, committed to the perspective it inhabits, but there are page long lists of every river they can think of, long digressions on Little House in the Prairie, and enough word association games to make you feel like it might be nonsense anyway. That being said, I found the prose to really work for me, not necessarily because of brilliant individual clauses but because of the way they all flowed together. I am almost always entirely rhythm deaf when it comes to reading (or at least not actively conscious of rhythm), only really noticing it if something's particularly clunky (looking at you, Ernest Cline), but man are there passages of this that flow together beautifully and cohere into much more than sum of the parts because of the way they roll off the tongue (or the brain, in this case). If you can get past the original shock of the way this is written, Ducks, Newburyport is actually pretty easy to slide into and enjoy and will almost certainly enter your own head and monologue at some point.
The interludes themselves are pretty unremarkable, following a mountain lion, but they primarily work as a contrast to the flowing prose of the narrator, a series of quick, terse, to the point page long interruptions. The contrast is simple- the mountain lion is worried about two things, getting her next meal and taking care of her cubs, while our housewife is worried about any number of things at any given time- school shooters, Open Carry guys, whether she is permanently broken by her mother's death, the relationship dynamics of classic movies she watches while she bakes, her own shyness, Trump's relationship with Melania whether she's a good mother, whether she neglected her eldest daughter while she was dating her now husband, the extinction of various species of animals, whether her kid's will inherit her shyness, et cetera et cetera. The point is rather obvious, that the age of information is too overwhelming for any human to process healthily, it all spurting out of us in the form of various neuroses and pet concerns and favorite books and movies through which we see our own lives through the lens of.
The narration doesn't feel real but it does feel true, hyperreal, an exaggerated reflection of our own familiar thought processes, our own inability to handle the waves of information that cascade toward us everyday, the inability to identify any real sort of signal from the noise of modern reality taken to an absurd conclusion. That being said, this is not disrespectful to its narrator (or at least I do not perceive it to be). If anything, it is a celebration of her perspective, one that would usually be perceived as "boring", especially in the literary world: a housewife, mother of 4, who stays at home all day baking. There are points where this goes from abstract digression about something or another (i.e., what you would stereotypically expect a housewife to do all day) to something emotional from her past that are breathtaking in the way they transition and the amount of emotion they leave the reader with because of the way it breaks up an otherwise mundane part of her existence. This book clearly holds that this perspective, that the internal monologue and the lives of the "boring," is as worthy of respect, as interesting a collection of idiosyncrasies and personal tragedies, grand successes and tragic failures, as any other perspective.
At least a part of this is an elevation of domestic labor, on the difficulties of it as well as the dignity of it. Our housewife spends most of her time either baking, cleaning up after her children, or taking care of her children, and it makes you feel and understand the amount of time and effort that goes into managing a household without real help from her husband (her husband is mostly away on work travel throughout this). I spent a number of pages of this wanting to apologize to my mother for not helping around the house more when I was a kid.
All that being said, interpreting this and saying any of it definitively can feel like a bit of a fruitless exercise. This many pages with this much packed in and not much didacticism to be found makes this at least somewhat of a rorschach test for the reader, which can be obnoxious if done poorly but this works well and there's enough there to leave plenty to chew on and wrestle with it.
I did really enjoy it but the 1000 pages is quite intimidating. I was into it for most of its length but there weren't points where I was a little fed up. If I'm being honest, you can probably read the first 150 pages and the last 150 pages and get 85% of the same experience, which makes that probably my recommendation for people not already 100% sold by the description of the novel.
SPOILERS
Still split on the ending of this one. Feels simultaneously like the only way this book could end and also like the author flinching away from their own premise. The latter because this book spends 950 pages dedicated almost entirely to the narrator's interior life, her perspective, the way she sees her day to day life, to the point of basically being a book without a plot, that to end on what is basically an action set piece feels like almost a copout. The former because while nothing really happens, there are a number of small disasters happening throughout the book, and this is a book that primarily finds itself in the narrator's worries it only makes sense that her biggest ones become manifest at the end. The more I think about it the more I lean toward a positive view of the ending. The horrors and atrocities we've inflicted on the natural world are coming quickly for the human one in ways big and small, and the coming awfulness and the excitement that comes with it may be the only thing that breaks our neurotic information-infested existence.
An exercise in style first and foremost, this novel with the exception of interludes takes the form of one long sentence, broken up only by "the fact thats," consisting mostly of the internal monologue and word associations of an unnamed Ohio housewife. It never plunges into full nonsensical digression like Joyce would, committed to the perspective it inhabits, but there are page long lists of every river they can think of, long digressions on Little House in the Prairie, and enough word association games to make you feel like it might be nonsense anyway. That being said, I found the prose to really work for me, not necessarily because of brilliant individual clauses but because of the way they all flowed together. I am almost always entirely rhythm deaf when it comes to reading (or at least not actively conscious of rhythm), only really noticing it if something's particularly clunky (looking at you, Ernest Cline), but man are there passages of this that flow together beautifully and cohere into much more than sum of the parts because of the way they roll off the tongue (or the brain, in this case). If you can get past the original shock of the way this is written, Ducks, Newburyport is actually pretty easy to slide into and enjoy and will almost certainly enter your own head and monologue at some point.
The interludes themselves are pretty unremarkable, following a mountain lion, but they primarily work as a contrast to the flowing prose of the narrator, a series of quick, terse, to the point page long interruptions. The contrast is simple- the mountain lion is worried about two things, getting her next meal and taking care of her cubs, while our housewife is worried about any number of things at any given time- school shooters, Open Carry guys, whether she is permanently broken by her mother's death, the relationship dynamics of classic movies she watches while she bakes, her own shyness, Trump's relationship with Melania whether she's a good mother, whether she neglected her eldest daughter while she was dating her now husband, the extinction of various species of animals, whether her kid's will inherit her shyness, et cetera et cetera. The point is rather obvious, that the age of information is too overwhelming for any human to process healthily, it all spurting out of us in the form of various neuroses and pet concerns and favorite books and movies through which we see our own lives through the lens of.
The narration doesn't feel real but it does feel true, hyperreal, an exaggerated reflection of our own familiar thought processes, our own inability to handle the waves of information that cascade toward us everyday, the inability to identify any real sort of signal from the noise of modern reality taken to an absurd conclusion. That being said, this is not disrespectful to its narrator (or at least I do not perceive it to be). If anything, it is a celebration of her perspective, one that would usually be perceived as "boring", especially in the literary world: a housewife, mother of 4, who stays at home all day baking. There are points where this goes from abstract digression about something or another (i.e., what you would stereotypically expect a housewife to do all day) to something emotional from her past that are breathtaking in the way they transition and the amount of emotion they leave the reader with because of the way it breaks up an otherwise mundane part of her existence. This book clearly holds that this perspective, that the internal monologue and the lives of the "boring," is as worthy of respect, as interesting a collection of idiosyncrasies and personal tragedies, grand successes and tragic failures, as any other perspective.
At least a part of this is an elevation of domestic labor, on the difficulties of it as well as the dignity of it. Our housewife spends most of her time either baking, cleaning up after her children, or taking care of her children, and it makes you feel and understand the amount of time and effort that goes into managing a household without real help from her husband (her husband is mostly away on work travel throughout this). I spent a number of pages of this wanting to apologize to my mother for not helping around the house more when I was a kid.
All that being said, interpreting this and saying any of it definitively can feel like a bit of a fruitless exercise. This many pages with this much packed in and not much didacticism to be found makes this at least somewhat of a rorschach test for the reader, which can be obnoxious if done poorly but this works well and there's enough there to leave plenty to chew on and wrestle with it.
I did really enjoy it but the 1000 pages is quite intimidating. I was into it for most of its length but there weren't points where I was a little fed up. If I'm being honest, you can probably read the first 150 pages and the last 150 pages and get 85% of the same experience, which makes that probably my recommendation for people not already 100% sold by the description of the novel.
SPOILERS
Still split on the ending of this one. Feels simultaneously like the only way this book could end and also like the author flinching away from their own premise. The latter because this book spends 950 pages dedicated almost entirely to the narrator's interior life, her perspective, the way she sees her day to day life, to the point of basically being a book without a plot, that to end on what is basically an action set piece feels like almost a copout. The former because while nothing really happens, there are a number of small disasters happening throughout the book, and this is a book that primarily finds itself in the narrator's worries it only makes sense that her biggest ones become manifest at the end. The more I think about it the more I lean toward a positive view of the ending. The horrors and atrocities we've inflicted on the natural world are coming quickly for the human one in ways big and small, and the coming awfulness and the excitement that comes with it may be the only thing that breaks our neurotic information-infested existence.
charlottereed's review against another edition
5.0
surprisingly to me - i was very sad when the book ended.
jenmulsow's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
This is a very strange book but worth listening to.
amyhdavis's review against another edition
4.0
Stream of consciousness novel, incredibly long, frustrating at times, but ultimately worth it.
quilant's review against another edition
5.0
WOW what a book, one of those that’s so rich and complex that it’s wild to realize it’s fiction. Thought provoking, devastating, hopeful and timely, genuinely wish it didn’t have to end and also longingly curious about what the unnamed narrator would have to say about the second half of the Trump era, covid quarantines, 2020 police brutality and the current state of the world.
tallonrk1's review against another edition
3.0
77 / C+
Ducks, Newburyport is a monster of a novel that i've been working my way through since the start of winter break. I read through about 650 of its 1000 pages by the time winter break ended, and over the past two months have been slowly making my way through the remaining 350 when I'm not reading for classes. Overall I'm glad I read it if only for the experience. The novel is experimental in form-- it's a rambling inner stream-of-consciousness monologue of a housewife in Ohio who bakes pies for a living and takes care of her kids, no periods in between thoughts, only commas, no breaking up of paragraphs, its just a block of text. That stream of consciousness is interspersed with short narrative sections about a mountain lion searching for her lost cubs. The novel is strange because nothing really happens and theres not much of a plot (though some things begin to happen by the end of the novel), and yet I was compelled to keep reading for some reason. I think theres an allure to the book in how meditative it is-- your eyes can just glide across the page, absorbing information on a surface level, and it becomes almost trance-like. The marketing for this book oversells it a bit i think-- ive seen reviews and such that call it the next great american novel, or call it a polemic against Trump's america and American gun culture, but the novel's cultural critiques are pretty surface-level, and it's certainly not a great novel. But it is impressive in its ambition and scope and its fairly successful experimentation with form, but I would never personally recommend this book to another person. That being said, if you do want to read it, a working knowledge of American film history would do you well.
Ducks, Newburyport is a monster of a novel that i've been working my way through since the start of winter break. I read through about 650 of its 1000 pages by the time winter break ended, and over the past two months have been slowly making my way through the remaining 350 when I'm not reading for classes. Overall I'm glad I read it if only for the experience. The novel is experimental in form-- it's a rambling inner stream-of-consciousness monologue of a housewife in Ohio who bakes pies for a living and takes care of her kids, no periods in between thoughts, only commas, no breaking up of paragraphs, its just a block of text. That stream of consciousness is interspersed with short narrative sections about a mountain lion searching for her lost cubs. The novel is strange because nothing really happens and theres not much of a plot (though some things begin to happen by the end of the novel), and yet I was compelled to keep reading for some reason. I think theres an allure to the book in how meditative it is-- your eyes can just glide across the page, absorbing information on a surface level, and it becomes almost trance-like. The marketing for this book oversells it a bit i think-- ive seen reviews and such that call it the next great american novel, or call it a polemic against Trump's america and American gun culture, but the novel's cultural critiques are pretty surface-level, and it's certainly not a great novel. But it is impressive in its ambition and scope and its fairly successful experimentation with form, but I would never personally recommend this book to another person. That being said, if you do want to read it, a working knowledge of American film history would do you well.
apurvanagpal's review
3.0
3.5⭐️
..the fact that I finally finished reading DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT, enjoyed it, was overwhelmed by it, exhausted, the fact that it was a roaster coaster ride, a monologue running a 1000 pages long, dear god, the fact that it took me a month to read this one, dipping in and out of the mind of a 50-something homebaker in Ohio and her random pool of thoughts all ranging from her personal relationships to gun violence, climate change, old Hollywood movies, Trump, oh my she really hates him, despises him, and I loved her wit for that, the fact that she’s never tired of thinking, while all I can think of right now is how to review this one. Oof!
Ducks, Newburyport is a single sentence, tireless stream-of-conscious narrative, an endless string of literally everything a that goes on inside the head of a homebaker in Ohio. She’s going about her daily chores, mixing the batter for her pies while at the back of her head her thoughts are relaying from her insecurities as a mother to the irresponsible killings of young black men and everything that’s wrong in the world. The idea was to address every possible thing that a wife and a mother consciously or unconsciously worry about; the safety of her children, her critical view of herself as a mother who’s not good enough for her kids or the increasing violence, gun laws and legal permits to keep weapons at home. Her anxiety, being in her 50s and mothering 4 kids, baking and delivering pies to make ends meet with his husband, is pretty evident.
Her thoughts are periodically broken by brief sections of a story of a mountain lioness, who seek to protect and find her cubs, her journey with and to them. These inserts were a pretty clever move by the author to offer a breather from her thoughts and draw a parallel and another aspect of one of her themes ie. Motherhood. I loved how the situation of a lioness on loose comes into her narration, the two plots intersecting very briefly and moving in their own separate ways after serving their purpose.
I did like her approach for the book, written the way it is, the projection of a housewife with a billion bizarre thoughts, both random and anxious, and I don’t think it would’ve done the same had it been written the traditional way. The hypnotic rhythm draws you in and feels like an almost natural buzzing of thoughts, getting in and out of a certain trance or memories triggered one after the other, like her thoughts bouncing from her relationship with her daughter to being a daughter herself and her guilt in both the respective roles. These bits were brilliantly done.
Having said all this, there were parts that did not work for me as a reader. Although the entire book is supposed to be a single running sentence, it doesn’t always read like one. Sections of it felt like a bunch of sentences strung together with a comma separating them, a little too worked up and rigid in places.
There were long sections of commentaries about old Hollywood movies and stars or about milkshakes that go on for pages stopped making sense to me, felt exhausting and almost made me skim through them.
To me, this book is entirely an experience driven read. While I thoroughly enjoyed parts of it and know the experience wouldn’t have been the same any other way, I honestly feel that the truly random nuisance that felt artificially placed and the chunky repetitive parts made it a little monotonous and dull to the point of annoyance. They were may be for a purpose of showing how a person’s thoughts circle back to an underlaying issue or guilt that we might have, but it does become tedious to read that on paper.
For a 1000 page book, I did not go in expecting every page to hold my attention equally, but had it been a tad 200 pages shorter and more cohesive, it would’ve worked better as an overall reading experience.
I give this tome of a book a 3.5/5 and although I’m in the minority for not “loving” this one, I did really enjoy most of it.
An overwhelming and an extremely experimental work of fiction.
..the fact that I finally finished reading DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT, enjoyed it, was overwhelmed by it, exhausted, the fact that it was a roaster coaster ride, a monologue running a 1000 pages long, dear god, the fact that it took me a month to read this one, dipping in and out of the mind of a 50-something homebaker in Ohio and her random pool of thoughts all ranging from her personal relationships to gun violence, climate change, old Hollywood movies, Trump, oh my she really hates him, despises him, and I loved her wit for that, the fact that she’s never tired of thinking, while all I can think of right now is how to review this one. Oof!
Ducks, Newburyport is a single sentence, tireless stream-of-conscious narrative, an endless string of literally everything a that goes on inside the head of a homebaker in Ohio. She’s going about her daily chores, mixing the batter for her pies while at the back of her head her thoughts are relaying from her insecurities as a mother to the irresponsible killings of young black men and everything that’s wrong in the world. The idea was to address every possible thing that a wife and a mother consciously or unconsciously worry about; the safety of her children, her critical view of herself as a mother who’s not good enough for her kids or the increasing violence, gun laws and legal permits to keep weapons at home. Her anxiety, being in her 50s and mothering 4 kids, baking and delivering pies to make ends meet with his husband, is pretty evident.
Her thoughts are periodically broken by brief sections of a story of a mountain lioness, who seek to protect and find her cubs, her journey with and to them. These inserts were a pretty clever move by the author to offer a breather from her thoughts and draw a parallel and another aspect of one of her themes ie. Motherhood. I loved how the situation of a lioness on loose comes into her narration, the two plots intersecting very briefly and moving in their own separate ways after serving their purpose.
I did like her approach for the book, written the way it is, the projection of a housewife with a billion bizarre thoughts, both random and anxious, and I don’t think it would’ve done the same had it been written the traditional way. The hypnotic rhythm draws you in and feels like an almost natural buzzing of thoughts, getting in and out of a certain trance or memories triggered one after the other, like her thoughts bouncing from her relationship with her daughter to being a daughter herself and her guilt in both the respective roles. These bits were brilliantly done.
Having said all this, there were parts that did not work for me as a reader. Although the entire book is supposed to be a single running sentence, it doesn’t always read like one. Sections of it felt like a bunch of sentences strung together with a comma separating them, a little too worked up and rigid in places.
There were long sections of commentaries about old Hollywood movies and stars or about milkshakes that go on for pages stopped making sense to me, felt exhausting and almost made me skim through them.
To me, this book is entirely an experience driven read. While I thoroughly enjoyed parts of it and know the experience wouldn’t have been the same any other way, I honestly feel that the truly random nuisance that felt artificially placed and the chunky repetitive parts made it a little monotonous and dull to the point of annoyance. They were may be for a purpose of showing how a person’s thoughts circle back to an underlaying issue or guilt that we might have, but it does become tedious to read that on paper.
For a 1000 page book, I did not go in expecting every page to hold my attention equally, but had it been a tad 200 pages shorter and more cohesive, it would’ve worked better as an overall reading experience.
I give this tome of a book a 3.5/5 and although I’m in the minority for not “loving” this one, I did really enjoy most of it.
An overwhelming and an extremely experimental work of fiction.
alandp's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Interesting and enjoyable but a real challenge to read. I struggled to hold the chronology in my head and the continuous prose with no breaks made it very hard to manage the reading. No obvious opportunities to stop reading.
That it was 1000 pages felt more like self indulgent, "can I do this" artistic statement than something truly necessary for the plot, character, narrative or truth.
That it was 1000 pages felt more like self indulgent, "can I do this" artistic statement than something truly necessary for the plot, character, narrative or truth.