A review by margedalloway
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

3.0

I'm actually going to miss having this woman's voice in my head. It feels like someone combined Wittgenstein's Mistress and the Adrienne Rich collection Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, which could have gone very, very badly. Instead I was surprised by how compulsive I found a one sentence, 1,000 page novel; the housewife's inner turmoil makes for a macabre read, both incredibly depressing and very funny, and the prose itself is clear and precise, impressively never tripping over the ambitious one sentence structure. Additionally, I think it's probably one of the stronger attempts to fuse politics and fiction out of the books published this century, carefully arranging the anxieties of contemporary life almost like a mosaic image. I'm not sure if I ever found/thought of an explanation that merits the novel being written as a single sentence, which made it difficult to fully shrug off the "self-indulgent" label I had attached to the novel when I started it. I also think the ending, where

the man who delivers feed for the housewife's chickens; a MAGA hat wearing, racist, misogynistic, creep, bursts into the house with a gun, and the family narrowly escape becoming the victims of type of massacre the housewife spends the other 950 pages of the novel reflecting on

was ill-advised, somewhat shattering the power of the rest of the novel brought by the "everyman" nature of the housewife. I still really enjoyed it overall, and think it was a very strong contender for the Booker (though I do think Evaristo was in a class of her own, no matter what the judges went with), and I hope it will prove a lasting work of fiction.