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A review by reads_avec_chats
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
5.0
Katy Waldman says, in her review in The New Yorker, “Verisimilitude is not the goal here: real people don’t verbalize their emotional weather so relentlessly or spin off into constant rhymes and puns.” Oh yes they do. I get that this book might not be for everyone, but for me, this novel was thrilling, and affirming. I felt that Lucy Ellmann entered my own mind. She created a narrator who shares my pattern of thinking, complete with snatches of song, and rhymes that unwittingly serve as vehicles of transportation from one thought to the next. And the narrator and I have so many overlapping thoughts, at times verbatim, it was uncanny. Though the voice comes across as authentic and natural, Ellmann succeeded in capturing her narrator’s interiority through skill and brilliance. What talent.
At first glance the book may seem intimidating, with no room to breathe, but it has such energy that the prose zooms. It’s also a book that allows you to put it down without having to go back and review when you pick it up again. The character is highly engaging, often funny (I laughed out loud reading about her trip to the dentist) even as she’s heartbroken by personal losses (especially the illness and death of her mother), practically immobilized by shyness, dismayed by Trump, lamenting of current and historical injustices, fearful of gun violence, buried in debt from a bout of cancer, overwhelmed with the responsibilities of rearing children and chickens and her job.
(I disagree with the blurbers and reviewers who label her a “housewife.” The narrator, in addition to being a wife and mother, is a baker who works out of her own kitchen. Were she a computer programmer working from home what would they call her?)
While it isn’t exactly a traditional novel any more than, say, Ulysses or The Waves are traditional novels, there is a plot, and a subplot, and they do weave together. And the narrator is ultimately forced to face her biggest fear.
An exhilarating read.
Thanks for listening.
At first glance the book may seem intimidating, with no room to breathe, but it has such energy that the prose zooms. It’s also a book that allows you to put it down without having to go back and review when you pick it up again. The character is highly engaging, often funny (I laughed out loud reading about her trip to the dentist) even as she’s heartbroken by personal losses (especially the illness and death of her mother), practically immobilized by shyness, dismayed by Trump, lamenting of current and historical injustices, fearful of gun violence, buried in debt from a bout of cancer, overwhelmed with the responsibilities of rearing children and chickens and her job.
(I disagree with the blurbers and reviewers who label her a “housewife.” The narrator, in addition to being a wife and mother, is a baker who works out of her own kitchen. Were she a computer programmer working from home what would they call her?)
While it isn’t exactly a traditional novel any more than, say, Ulysses or The Waves are traditional novels, there is a plot, and a subplot, and they do weave together. And the narrator is ultimately forced to face her biggest fear.
An exhilarating read.
Thanks for listening.