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A review by onerodeahorse
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
5.0
The majority of Lucy Ellmann's new novel, which has been longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and is published by the brilliant Galley Beggar Press, stretches just over 1000 pages, and is made up of a single, long, run-on sentence without full stops. This is the inner monologue, set over several months, of a nameless Ohio housewife who spends her days baking tartes tatin and cinnamon rolls to sell to local businesses. She frets about her four children (Jake, Gillian and Ben - children with her current husband Leo, and Stacy, her eldest daughter from a previous marriage to Frank), about gun violence, about the environment, about the loss of her parents, about television, chemicals, American history, wildlife, her latticing skills, Leo's job as an engineering lecturer, old black and white films, Donald Trump, and a million other tiny anxieties of contemporary life. Through this unending deluge of information the reader gradually pieces together her family history and the forces acting upon it.
But it's not true that the book is "one long sentence", as I've read in other reviews. Every 50 -100 pages or so, the monologue of thoughts is interrupted by the story of a mountain lioness and her cubs, up in the mountains of Ohio. These sections are brief but tell their own story - and of course, as the book draws on, these storylines converge in ways that feel completely satisfying and moving.
Here is an incomplete list of things that I googled while reading Ducks, Newburyport:
- Serpent Mount
- Poffertje
- Lana Turner
- Fanouropita
- Daily Carry
- Swiffer
- PFOA
- Tardigrades
- Gnadenhutten massacre
- Styptic stick
- CONELRAD
- dceaglecam
- Knights of Columbus
- Spanokopita
- All That Heaven Allows
- Resignation Syndrome
- Fallingwater
There's no escaping the fact that this novel is very long and written in a way that will put off a lot of readers. When I think of other books I've read that are like this, some of which I love - big, Serious, Ambitious, Weighty, Massive, Worthy, Literary tomes that seek to present a whole world in totality (I'm thinking about books like Ulysses, Infinite Jest, 2666, The Magic Mountain, Europe Central and more besides), there is something very male about them - they are mostly written by men, and in their systematic, self-conscious Seriousness and Weightiness, they feel very masculine. In this way I think that Ducks, Newburyport is a genuinely important book. While it traces back clearly to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (though it is more immediately readable than either of them), it dares to write a thousand page stream of consciousness from the POV of a housewife who is mostly baking pies throughout the course of the book. The inner life of an Ohio housewife, the book says, is as important and as capital-M Meaningful a project for properly serious fiction as anything else. For me the very existence of this book is a force for good, and I absolutely loved it.
But it's not true that the book is "one long sentence", as I've read in other reviews. Every 50 -100 pages or so, the monologue of thoughts is interrupted by the story of a mountain lioness and her cubs, up in the mountains of Ohio. These sections are brief but tell their own story - and of course, as the book draws on, these storylines converge in ways that feel completely satisfying and moving.
Here is an incomplete list of things that I googled while reading Ducks, Newburyport:
- Serpent Mount
- Poffertje
- Lana Turner
- Fanouropita
- Daily Carry
- Swiffer
- PFOA
- Tardigrades
- Gnadenhutten massacre
- Styptic stick
- CONELRAD
- dceaglecam
- Knights of Columbus
- Spanokopita
- All That Heaven Allows
- Resignation Syndrome
- Fallingwater
There's no escaping the fact that this novel is very long and written in a way that will put off a lot of readers. When I think of other books I've read that are like this, some of which I love - big, Serious, Ambitious, Weighty, Massive, Worthy, Literary tomes that seek to present a whole world in totality (I'm thinking about books like Ulysses, Infinite Jest, 2666, The Magic Mountain, Europe Central and more besides), there is something very male about them - they are mostly written by men, and in their systematic, self-conscious Seriousness and Weightiness, they feel very masculine. In this way I think that Ducks, Newburyport is a genuinely important book. While it traces back clearly to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (though it is more immediately readable than either of them), it dares to write a thousand page stream of consciousness from the POV of a housewife who is mostly baking pies throughout the course of the book. The inner life of an Ohio housewife, the book says, is as important and as capital-M Meaningful a project for properly serious fiction as anything else. For me the very existence of this book is a force for good, and I absolutely loved it.