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A review by arirang
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
2.0
The book responsible for my most annoying reading experience of 2019 wins my favourite prize ...
I have a lot of respect for Galley Beggar, and admire them for having the courage to publish such an ambitious novel. My review is going to be a little unfair, but there are plenty of reviews here that present only the positive sides of this novel, and I can’t honestly say I enjoyed this in the slightest.
It’s tempting, as many have, to review in the (too easily?) imitated style of the book but having waded through 19,396 , the fact that’s, I’d rather not add more. So instead a recipe:
How to bake a Ducks, Newburyport pie cake
Take an ordinary piece of text:
. We had a poor old erratic mouse in the kitchen once, that wasn’t acting normal. The poor thing kept going in circles. Maybe the cats had brought him in and played with him and injured him, or maybe he was just a little crazee, and came in all by himself. He didn’t act like Edward. Edward always behaved very sensibly. Edward was brave. An adult mouse can have a friendship with a human child. Maybe he was cold and hungry, or thirsty, the crazy mouse, not Edward, and we should have given him some refreshments. Really he acted like he needed to go to a mouse nursing home, or a mouse senior day care center. We were going to try to catch him but he disappeared and I don’t know what happened to him. The cats probably gobbled him up in the night. I don’t think he was the same wild mouse we had last summer.
Search and replace all “.”’s with “, the fact that”, and capitalise the letter immediately after:
the fact that, we had a poor old erratic mouse in the kitchen once, that wasn’t acting normal, the fact that the poor thing kept going in circles, the fact that maybe the cats had brought him in and played with him and injured him, or maybe he was just a little crazee, and came in all by himself, the fact that he didn’t act like Edward, the fact that Edward always behaved very sensibly, the fact that Edward was brave, and smart, the fact that an adult mouse can have a friendship with a human child, the fact that maybe he was cold and hungry, or thirsty, the crazy mouse, not Edward, and we should have given him some refreshments, the fact that really he acted like he needed to go to a mouse nursing home, or a mouse senior day care center, the fact that we were going to try to catch him but he disappeared and I don’t know what happened to him, the fact that the cats probably gobbled him up in the night, the fact that I don’t think he was the same wild mouse we had last summer, the fact that
voila, “experimental” prose (look, no full stops) and an upped word count in one simple operation. [A real example plucked at random from the many pages of Ducks, Newburyport].
Then season liberally with word riffs, use of a thesaurus and long lists:
the fact that all in all we’re really just a normal Joy, Pledge, Crest, Tide, Dove, Woolite, Palmolive, Clorox, Rolaids, Pepto-Bismol, Alka-Seltzer, Desitin, Advil, Aleve, Tylenol, Anacin, Bayer, Excedrin, Vitamin C, Kleenex, Kotex, Tampax, Altoid, Barbazol, Almay, Revlon, Cetaphil, Right Guard, Old Spice, Gillette, Q-Tip, Johnson & Johnson, Vaseline, Listerine, Head ’n’ Shoulders, Safe Owl, Eagle Brand, Jolly Green Giant, Land O’Lakes, Lucerne, Sealtest, Clover, Blue Bonnet, Half & Half, Snyder, VanCamp, Wish-Bone, French’s, Skyline, Empress, Gerber, Nabisco, Heinz, Kraft, Quaker Oats, Sunkist, Purina, Vlasic, Oreo, Shredded Wheat, Arm & Hammer, Jell-O, Pez, Sara Lee, Chock Full o’ Nuts, Libby’s, Pepperidge Farm, Fleischmann’s, Morton, General Mills, King Arthur, Bell’s, Reese’s Pieces kind of household like everybody else, “Houston, we got a problem,” even with all these macrophages and tardigrades sneaking around, whatever they are,
(“like everybody else”?)
Make use of the commas as part of the full stop replacement device, to create humorous ambiguity:
I couldn’t do it when I was pregnant, the fact that I can’t make Leo do it. Move crates I mean, not get pregnant, the fact that
you will need to use this particular ingredient at least 75 times in a full-sized cake.
Add the tiniest pinch of plot but use this for more contrived world play. E.g. have your character get a flat tyre on a snowy day on the way back from the dentist, and be rescued by a character called Jesus. Her amusement that there are people called Jesus can then be used to make a Jesus saved me joke that you can re-use 15 or so times.
Sprinkle in acronyms to taste, add (over-)generous dollops of film plots and lashings of Little House on The Prairie syrup.
Put in the oven for many long hours, and then remove the full-stop replacement cake from the oven and and cover with a frosting of sour dream sequences.
Break-up any monotony with interspersed layers of a more conventional pie baked from the story of a mountain lion (albeit narrated from the lion’s perspective), taking care to hide in one layer, like the sixpence in a Christmas pudding, a scene to be discovered by the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award (new animal sub-division).
And, having spent 1000 pages largely going nowhere (well to the mall and to the dentist and back), add an anachronistic topping of a dramatic ending.
-------------
On my first attempt at this book - read on publication - I abandoned it and struggled to justify a star. See below for my original review in spoilers. The Booker longlisting and a 12 hour flight gave me the opportunity to revisit and finish it.
It improved a little on a re-read – the more personal sequences of the narrator’s past were powerful and built up over the book’s length, and I was left with an uneasy feeling that her husband was not the saint that she convinced herself he was (as another GR friend Neil joked, you need to read between the Lions). And, when not employed to excess, even the repetition works well.
The biggest problem I had wasn’t its length per se (the 426,100 words) - I have read and very much enjoyed several significantly longer books - it’s the fact that it feels at times like length is conflated with quality. For example, the publishers pre-release campaign largely consistent of photos of the brick-like time measured up against other books.
The quite literally pointless “, the fact that” device occurs, as mentioned, 19,396 times in the book. That’s 58,188 words, which enough for many writers to write a whole novel. If they make an audio version, then given the three words would take a second to say, the unlucky narrator will actually spend over 5 hours simply repeating ... and repeating and repeating ... “, the fact that”
The indictment of certain aspects of US culture is strong and timely. I boarded the plane where I read the bulk of this book to breaking news of one mass shooting, and landed to news of another, the second in Ohio and close to where the book is set. But as a European I found it rather reinforced my pre-existing biases. It would be more challenging to read a book with characters presenting the opposite views (to be fair Ali Smith's seasonal quartet has the same issue in UK politics). And, if anything, the political analysis rather resorts to Trumpesque name calling, the narrators’ favourite Mary Poppins-based example inspired by the Sun, but fortunately able to be sourced to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2000/feb/14/mondaymediasection.pressandpublishing3). An example, which captures much of the strengths and weaknesses of the book:
, the fact that I think he’s a big bully, coward, mean guy, third rate, just like Trump, “Sad!”, the fact that he could be a lot of places by now, this shooter, not Trump, though Trump gets around too, golfing and holding rallies, the fact that they can’t get him to stop holding rallies, the fact that he goes for the adulation, bigly, ululation, elation, election, erection, cracks, failed bridge, broken, flaccid, the fact that he could be right outside our house right now, the selfie killer, not Donald Trump, I hope, the fact that maybe the selfie killer, Trump, and the lion are outside our house, help, the fact that I don’t know which would be worse, the fact that
Upping my rating to 1.5 stars rounded to 2.
But I can’t help but feel that if the movie sequences and Little House parts were drastically pared back, the dreams ditched, the lists and gratuitous repetition reduced, ‘, the fact that’ used only to mark a genuine shift in thoughts rather than every time a full stop is needed, and the Hollywood ending removed, this would have been a more fulfilling and much shorter book.
But then it likely wouldn’t have got nominated for prizes – and again all praise to the author and to the publisher for the courage to go with the unadultered version.
Many of my GR and real-life friends loved this novel, but this wasn't for me. After 100 pages I decided to stop.
There is a lot here and I think what one gets out of it will differ according to one's interest. For me they include Korea and politics.
And indeed Korea - South and North - features throughout. These are the first 5 mentions:
Your Views on North Korea
...
Hillary, Qadaffi, Syria, North Korea, sisters, sororities, Elks, the Brontes, Phoebe and me
...
the fact that some girls spread a nerve agent on the North Korean leader's brother, Kim Jong-ill or something
...
North Korean nuclear missiles
...
the fact that you have to wonder why slime eels have to be transported anywhere, but Koreans like them, the fact that they eat slime eels, friendly wolf eels, hagfish, Kim Jong Un
showcasing the word play (Kim Jong-Ill - geddit? It doesn't even make sense since the hanja for the il (일) is 日 which means sun) and the respectful insight into different cultures. Indeed I note that the perceptive review in Private Eye also picked up on the 'oriental stereotyping', which is also a feature when a Chinese character is mentioned (Ming Dynasty porcelain, Mao jackets, terracotta warriors, Great Wall, wontons, pot-stickers .. cheap toys and electrical goods.)
Not surprisingly, Trump gets 137 mentions: these are the first 10:
the fact that Trump wants to take cover away from 630,000 Ohioans who took up Obamacare
the fact that Trump wants to get mining and oil drilling going in all the national parks, MAGA
"Rapid SSitty, SSSouth Dakota", James Mason, Trump Tower, beauty pageants, sexual harassment, "ssssexual harassment"
obstruction of justice, which is something Trump gets up to all the time
trompe d'oeil ... Trump l'oeil, Trump lies
not Trump
the fact that Trump called Melania a 'monster' when she is pregnant, and maybe she is a monster, but he's one to talk, fat bully
that twenty foot inflatable rooster outside the White House really does look like Trump
the fact that Mummy thought it was rude to comment on someone's appearance, but Trump does it all day, "Sad"
the fact I had a bad dream about trump last night, the fact he admitted to me he couldn't cope with the job
a highly insightful analysis, as we are less than 18 months away from the next US election, as to how Trump manages to appeal to his base and the strategies the Democrats might use to defeat him.
And the book carries on in that vein (127 more times for Trump).
It's not that I dislike long books - Knausgaard, Proust, Marias, Ferrante and Murakami have all written much longer novels (albeit in most cases, published in separate volumes), but they are world class writers.
Addition: I raised my concerns on the cultural point with the publisher. They were gracious enough to send me a helpful reply:
Most importantly, the thing to say is that it's the internal monologue of a character. It's the thoughts going through a particular person's head. Crucially, the un-policed thoughts. What she thinks doesn't necessarily reflect Lucy's worldview... Or anyone else's... It's true to a very particular person of an age, in a place, at a time... Those thoughts aren't always going to make us feel easy, or comfortable. Fiction is here to confront us with realities and ideas we might not like, among other things... She is not meant to be a perfect human being. If you're seeing faults with her, that's because she's a fully-realised creation.
That's the most important thing to remember, I think. Even so, if it isn't too absurd, and because I kind of love her, I do also want to defend this fictional person a bit. I can't remember the context, but I don't even think the Kim Jong-ill thing is a joke? She's just trying to remember his name. (Nor is she likely to have a clue about hanja... or be aware that people might get upset in relation to them. I'm now actually imagining her horrified thought-stream as she realises that there are sensitivities there...)
I also kind of feel like you've answered your own question about the Chinese character producing clichés - those are the first things that a person like this is likely to think of, don't you think?
Finally, it might be worth considering how race is one of the central themes of Ducks, Newburyport, and how the narrator's insensitivities are a vital part of this. For example, her eldest child is part Indigenous - and there is a pivotal scene involving her, a painful admission about feeling like an outsider, "not White" in a White family, and the narrator's horrified realisation of her own complicity, unawareness, and the fact that (if you'll excuse the pun), she has simply had no idea. So there is a very complex web here which is developed throughout the novel.
I hope you carry on reading. It feels sad for anyone not to be able to share in the pleasure of this book. (And I guess that's the final thing. It's intended as a gift for anyone and everyone. Except, maybe, Donald Trump.)
I have a lot of respect for Galley Beggar, and admire them for having the courage to publish such an ambitious novel. My review is going to be a little unfair, but there are plenty of reviews here that present only the positive sides of this novel, and I can’t honestly say I enjoyed this in the slightest.
It’s tempting, as many have, to review in the (too easily?) imitated style of the book but having waded through 19,396 , the fact that’s, I’d rather not add more. So instead a recipe:
How to bake a Ducks, Newburyport pie cake
Take an ordinary piece of text:
. We had a poor old erratic mouse in the kitchen once, that wasn’t acting normal. The poor thing kept going in circles. Maybe the cats had brought him in and played with him and injured him, or maybe he was just a little crazee, and came in all by himself. He didn’t act like Edward. Edward always behaved very sensibly. Edward was brave. An adult mouse can have a friendship with a human child. Maybe he was cold and hungry, or thirsty, the crazy mouse, not Edward, and we should have given him some refreshments. Really he acted like he needed to go to a mouse nursing home, or a mouse senior day care center. We were going to try to catch him but he disappeared and I don’t know what happened to him. The cats probably gobbled him up in the night. I don’t think he was the same wild mouse we had last summer.
Search and replace all “.”’s with “, the fact that”, and capitalise the letter immediately after:
the fact that, we had a poor old erratic mouse in the kitchen once, that wasn’t acting normal, the fact that the poor thing kept going in circles, the fact that maybe the cats had brought him in and played with him and injured him, or maybe he was just a little crazee, and came in all by himself, the fact that he didn’t act like Edward, the fact that Edward always behaved very sensibly, the fact that Edward was brave, and smart, the fact that an adult mouse can have a friendship with a human child, the fact that maybe he was cold and hungry, or thirsty, the crazy mouse, not Edward, and we should have given him some refreshments, the fact that really he acted like he needed to go to a mouse nursing home, or a mouse senior day care center, the fact that we were going to try to catch him but he disappeared and I don’t know what happened to him, the fact that the cats probably gobbled him up in the night, the fact that I don’t think he was the same wild mouse we had last summer, the fact that
voila, “experimental” prose (look, no full stops) and an upped word count in one simple operation. [A real example plucked at random from the many pages of Ducks, Newburyport].
Then season liberally with word riffs, use of a thesaurus and long lists:
the fact that all in all we’re really just a normal Joy, Pledge, Crest, Tide, Dove, Woolite, Palmolive, Clorox, Rolaids, Pepto-Bismol, Alka-Seltzer, Desitin, Advil, Aleve, Tylenol, Anacin, Bayer, Excedrin, Vitamin C, Kleenex, Kotex, Tampax, Altoid, Barbazol, Almay, Revlon, Cetaphil, Right Guard, Old Spice, Gillette, Q-Tip, Johnson & Johnson, Vaseline, Listerine, Head ’n’ Shoulders, Safe Owl, Eagle Brand, Jolly Green Giant, Land O’Lakes, Lucerne, Sealtest, Clover, Blue Bonnet, Half & Half, Snyder, VanCamp, Wish-Bone, French’s, Skyline, Empress, Gerber, Nabisco, Heinz, Kraft, Quaker Oats, Sunkist, Purina, Vlasic, Oreo, Shredded Wheat, Arm & Hammer, Jell-O, Pez, Sara Lee, Chock Full o’ Nuts, Libby’s, Pepperidge Farm, Fleischmann’s, Morton, General Mills, King Arthur, Bell’s, Reese’s Pieces kind of household like everybody else, “Houston, we got a problem,” even with all these macrophages and tardigrades sneaking around, whatever they are,
(“like everybody else”?)
Make use of the commas as part of the full stop replacement device, to create humorous ambiguity:
I couldn’t do it when I was pregnant, the fact that I can’t make Leo do it. Move crates I mean, not get pregnant, the fact that
you will need to use this particular ingredient at least 75 times in a full-sized cake.
Add the tiniest pinch of plot but use this for more contrived world play. E.g. have your character get a flat tyre on a snowy day on the way back from the dentist, and be rescued by a character called Jesus. Her amusement that there are people called Jesus can then be used to make a Jesus saved me joke that you can re-use 15 or so times.
Sprinkle in acronyms to taste, add (over-)generous dollops of film plots and lashings of Little House on The Prairie syrup.
Put in the oven for many long hours, and then remove the full-stop replacement cake from the oven and and cover with a frosting of sour dream sequences.
Break-up any monotony with interspersed layers of a more conventional pie baked from the story of a mountain lion (albeit narrated from the lion’s perspective), taking care to hide in one layer, like the sixpence in a Christmas pudding, a scene to be discovered by the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award (new animal sub-division).
And, having spent 1000 pages largely going nowhere (well to the mall and to the dentist and back), add an anachronistic topping of a dramatic ending.
-------------
On my first attempt at this book - read on publication - I abandoned it and struggled to justify a star. See below for my original review in spoilers. The Booker longlisting and a 12 hour flight gave me the opportunity to revisit and finish it.
It improved a little on a re-read – the more personal sequences of the narrator’s past were powerful and built up over the book’s length, and I was left with an uneasy feeling that her husband was not the saint that she convinced herself he was (as another GR friend Neil joked, you need to read between the Lions). And, when not employed to excess, even the repetition works well.
The biggest problem I had wasn’t its length per se (the 426,100 words) - I have read and very much enjoyed several significantly longer books - it’s the fact that it feels at times like length is conflated with quality. For example, the publishers pre-release campaign largely consistent of photos of the brick-like time measured up against other books.
The quite literally pointless “, the fact that” device occurs, as mentioned, 19,396 times in the book. That’s 58,188 words, which enough for many writers to write a whole novel. If they make an audio version, then given the three words would take a second to say, the unlucky narrator will actually spend over 5 hours simply repeating ... and repeating and repeating ... “, the fact that”
The indictment of certain aspects of US culture is strong and timely. I boarded the plane where I read the bulk of this book to breaking news of one mass shooting, and landed to news of another, the second in Ohio and close to where the book is set. But as a European I found it rather reinforced my pre-existing biases. It would be more challenging to read a book with characters presenting the opposite views (to be fair Ali Smith's seasonal quartet has the same issue in UK politics). And, if anything, the political analysis rather resorts to Trumpesque name calling, the narrators’ favourite Mary Poppins-based example inspired by the Sun, but fortunately able to be sourced to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2000/feb/14/mondaymediasection.pressandpublishing3). An example, which captures much of the strengths and weaknesses of the book:
, the fact that I think he’s a big bully, coward, mean guy, third rate, just like Trump, “Sad!”, the fact that he could be a lot of places by now, this shooter, not Trump, though Trump gets around too, golfing and holding rallies, the fact that they can’t get him to stop holding rallies, the fact that he goes for the adulation, bigly, ululation, elation, election, erection, cracks, failed bridge, broken, flaccid, the fact that he could be right outside our house right now, the selfie killer, not Donald Trump, I hope, the fact that maybe the selfie killer, Trump, and the lion are outside our house, help, the fact that I don’t know which would be worse, the fact that
Upping my rating to 1.5 stars rounded to 2.
But I can’t help but feel that if the movie sequences and Little House parts were drastically pared back, the dreams ditched, the lists and gratuitous repetition reduced, ‘, the fact that’ used only to mark a genuine shift in thoughts rather than every time a full stop is needed, and the Hollywood ending removed, this would have been a more fulfilling and much shorter book.
But then it likely wouldn’t have got nominated for prizes – and again all praise to the author and to the publisher for the courage to go with the unadultered version.
There is a lot here and I think what one gets out of it will differ according to one's interest. For me they include Korea and politics.
And indeed Korea - South and North - features throughout. These are the first 5 mentions:
Your Views on North Korea
...
Hillary, Qadaffi, Syria, North Korea, sisters, sororities, Elks, the Brontes, Phoebe and me
...
the fact that some girls spread a nerve agent on the North Korean leader's brother, Kim Jong-ill or something
...
North Korean nuclear missiles
...
the fact that you have to wonder why slime eels have to be transported anywhere, but Koreans like them, the fact that they eat slime eels, friendly wolf eels, hagfish, Kim Jong Un
showcasing the word play (Kim Jong-Ill - geddit? It doesn't even make sense since the hanja for the il (일) is 日 which means sun) and the respectful insight into different cultures. Indeed I note that the perceptive review in Private Eye also picked up on the 'oriental stereotyping', which is also a feature when a Chinese character is mentioned (Ming Dynasty porcelain, Mao jackets, terracotta warriors, Great Wall, wontons, pot-stickers .. cheap toys and electrical goods.)
Not surprisingly, Trump gets 137 mentions: these are the first 10:
the fact that Trump wants to take cover away from 630,000 Ohioans who took up Obamacare
the fact that Trump wants to get mining and oil drilling going in all the national parks, MAGA
"Rapid SSitty, SSSouth Dakota", James Mason, Trump Tower, beauty pageants, sexual harassment, "ssssexual harassment"
obstruction of justice, which is something Trump gets up to all the time
trompe d'oeil ... Trump l'oeil, Trump lies
not Trump
the fact that Trump called Melania a 'monster' when she is pregnant, and maybe she is a monster, but he's one to talk, fat bully
that twenty foot inflatable rooster outside the White House really does look like Trump
the fact that Mummy thought it was rude to comment on someone's appearance, but Trump does it all day, "Sad"
the fact I had a bad dream about trump last night, the fact he admitted to me he couldn't cope with the job
a highly insightful analysis, as we are less than 18 months away from the next US election, as to how Trump manages to appeal to his base and the strategies the Democrats might use to defeat him.
And the book carries on in that vein (127 more times for Trump).
It's not that I dislike long books - Knausgaard, Proust, Marias, Ferrante and Murakami have all written much longer novels (albeit in most cases, published in separate volumes), but they are world class writers.
Addition: I raised my concerns on the cultural point with the publisher. They were gracious enough to send me a helpful reply:
Most importantly, the thing to say is that it's the internal monologue of a character. It's the thoughts going through a particular person's head. Crucially, the un-policed thoughts. What she thinks doesn't necessarily reflect Lucy's worldview... Or anyone else's... It's true to a very particular person of an age, in a place, at a time... Those thoughts aren't always going to make us feel easy, or comfortable. Fiction is here to confront us with realities and ideas we might not like, among other things... She is not meant to be a perfect human being. If you're seeing faults with her, that's because she's a fully-realised creation.
That's the most important thing to remember, I think. Even so, if it isn't too absurd, and because I kind of love her, I do also want to defend this fictional person a bit. I can't remember the context, but I don't even think the Kim Jong-ill thing is a joke? She's just trying to remember his name. (Nor is she likely to have a clue about hanja... or be aware that people might get upset in relation to them. I'm now actually imagining her horrified thought-stream as she realises that there are sensitivities there...)
I also kind of feel like you've answered your own question about the Chinese character producing clichés - those are the first things that a person like this is likely to think of, don't you think?
Finally, it might be worth considering how race is one of the central themes of Ducks, Newburyport, and how the narrator's insensitivities are a vital part of this. For example, her eldest child is part Indigenous - and there is a pivotal scene involving her, a painful admission about feeling like an outsider, "not White" in a White family, and the narrator's horrified realisation of her own complicity, unawareness, and the fact that (if you'll excuse the pun), she has simply had no idea. So there is a very complex web here which is developed throughout the novel.
I hope you carry on reading. It feels sad for anyone not to be able to share in the pleasure of this book. (And I guess that's the final thing. It's intended as a gift for anyone and everyone. Except, maybe, Donald Trump.)