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A review by tallonrk1
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
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.