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A review by sam8834
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
5.0
I finished reading this a while ago and have been putting off talking about it, not because I don't know how to talk about it, but because it's hard to find the time to discuss a book about which you have so much to say. Lucy Ellmann has created something really special and brilliant here. I've spent much of my adult life reading and loving books like Ulysses, My Struggle, and okay, I tried Infinite Jest and couldn't finish it due to probably bad timing and being too busy in college. ANYway, one thought that would always follow me after reading those books is: I'd love to read something like this by a woman. An epic, autofictional novel that takes up space and is smart and weird and unapologetic in its unusual style. Ducks, Newburyport is a hundred percent that book.
Ellmann's narrator is a stay-at-home mom to four kids, who makes a little money selling her homemade pies. In Ducks, we are treated to her inner monologue. Actually, that's the whole book. No joke, it is a thousand pages of the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of a stay-at-home mom. And it's brilliant. Something I've always felt strongly about is that SAHMs get a bad rap in our culture. They aren't seen as very smart or interesting, largely because of the tireless, mundane, all-consuming, invisible work they do every day, and this stereotype makes it easy, I suppose, for some to write them off. They sort of come to be defined by their work in the home, and because that work isn't valued, they aren't either. What better way to resist that narrative than a thousand-page novel about a SAHMs inner thoughts? The narrator's thoughts and intellect are centered here in a way I haven't seen before, and I'm here for all of it.
The book is definitely anchored in a specific time and doesn't hide it, as many of the narrator's thoughts involve politics and other current events. She is horrified by the actions and general existence of the Trump administration, as well as by excessive American gun violence and the environmental effects humans and corporations continue to have on the planet. It is easy to see she has anxiety about much of this, depression too, imo, and throughout these social/political musings there are literary references, most notably to Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. I imagine the narrator goes off on these tangents about the latter because they are a comfort to assuage her worries about the former. It is hard to pull off this sort of timely writing in a novel, and though I don't know how it'll hold up 10 or 20 years from now, it works as a beautiful socio-cultural commentary of the wretched era we're currently going through. As if all that isn't enough, there's a mini-story embedded in the text, about a lioness who loses her cubs. It isn't immediately clear why this is included, but as the book goes on, the weaving in of it gels with the story so well and enhances it (as well as serving as a nice break in between Ellmann's massive text blocks).
The style of the text contributes to this, too. The long, meandering sentences that go on for tens, maybe hundreds, of pages give an urgency to the narrator's monologue: the anxiety one feels trying to parent kids in a world that isn't kind to itself. Basically, the general anxiety that develops in most of us just from watching the news for ten minutes. Everything is on fire and it's costing lives, so who has time for punctuation and sentences?! Ellmann uses repetition of the phrase, "the fact that..." which is kind of a clever resistance against the Trump administration's neglect and discarding of the truth. There is so much to love here, not just about the writing, but the structure and the way the text itself contributes to what's happening in the narrator's head.
Anyway, I'm trying to write this with a toddler talking nonstop in my ear, which I guess is fitting for this book, but the long and short of it is that I'm so appreciative of Ducks, Newburyport. It's the type of polarizing book readers will either love or hate, but imo, it's the epic auto-fictional novel we all need (I mean, we really don't need any more of these from men), and a book that'll stay with me for a long time.
Ellmann's narrator is a stay-at-home mom to four kids, who makes a little money selling her homemade pies. In Ducks, we are treated to her inner monologue. Actually, that's the whole book. No joke, it is a thousand pages of the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of a stay-at-home mom. And it's brilliant. Something I've always felt strongly about is that SAHMs get a bad rap in our culture. They aren't seen as very smart or interesting, largely because of the tireless, mundane, all-consuming, invisible work they do every day, and this stereotype makes it easy, I suppose, for some to write them off. They sort of come to be defined by their work in the home, and because that work isn't valued, they aren't either. What better way to resist that narrative than a thousand-page novel about a SAHMs inner thoughts? The narrator's thoughts and intellect are centered here in a way I haven't seen before, and I'm here for all of it.
The book is definitely anchored in a specific time and doesn't hide it, as many of the narrator's thoughts involve politics and other current events. She is horrified by the actions and general existence of the Trump administration, as well as by excessive American gun violence and the environmental effects humans and corporations continue to have on the planet. It is easy to see she has anxiety about much of this, depression too, imo, and throughout these social/political musings there are literary references, most notably to Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. I imagine the narrator goes off on these tangents about the latter because they are a comfort to assuage her worries about the former. It is hard to pull off this sort of timely writing in a novel, and though I don't know how it'll hold up 10 or 20 years from now, it works as a beautiful socio-cultural commentary of the wretched era we're currently going through. As if all that isn't enough, there's a mini-story embedded in the text, about a lioness who loses her cubs. It isn't immediately clear why this is included, but as the book goes on, the weaving in of it gels with the story so well and enhances it (as well as serving as a nice break in between Ellmann's massive text blocks).
The style of the text contributes to this, too. The long, meandering sentences that go on for tens, maybe hundreds, of pages give an urgency to the narrator's monologue: the anxiety one feels trying to parent kids in a world that isn't kind to itself. Basically, the general anxiety that develops in most of us just from watching the news for ten minutes. Everything is on fire and it's costing lives, so who has time for punctuation and sentences?! Ellmann uses repetition of the phrase, "the fact that..." which is kind of a clever resistance against the Trump administration's neglect and discarding of the truth. There is so much to love here, not just about the writing, but the structure and the way the text itself contributes to what's happening in the narrator's head.
Anyway, I'm trying to write this with a toddler talking nonstop in my ear, which I guess is fitting for this book, but the long and short of it is that I'm so appreciative of Ducks, Newburyport. It's the type of polarizing book readers will either love or hate, but imo, it's the epic auto-fictional novel we all need (I mean, we really don't need any more of these from men), and a book that'll stay with me for a long time.