A review by karp76
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

3.0

The fact that, what are we to make of this? This endlessness of thought, unwielding and broken only by the occasional vignette of a stray mountian lion? How are we to understand this and digest it, either accept or reject it the narrative and its purpose, whatever meaning and whatever effect it seeks to lull to us? Here in the afterwards, the last page closed, the sense is we cannot. There are no small moments to enjoy. No little pockets to examine or to savor. There is only its entirity, the mammoth of its being. The narrative, the fact that that may be too bold of to call it, or if we must define it, the work's breath and expanse of the mundane and Midwestern is so much - pies, chickens, guns, Ohio, musicals, baking - to the point of too much, to the very verge of exceeding the necessary or even extraordinary, that it renders and power of its expermient into the trifleness of gimmick. The fact that, perhaps, just perhaps, this was too much.