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A review by barrynorton
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
4.0
I've had this book on the shelf since September, when the 2019 Booker shortlist was announced. I've the reprint from Galley Beggar Press, on the front of which Cosmopolitan is quoted "Ulysses has nothing on this". I think that's an overstatement, at best.
In fact I hadn't read all of Ulysses last September, and I set myself the task of finally reading that cover-to-cover first, which I finally achieved on New Year's Eve. I consequently decided to wait until I was 10 books ahead in a new reading challenge before tackling this (it's thanks to COVID-19 that I had the time to do so).
At times, indeed, it echoes Ulysses and in particular Bloom, for instance, in self-censored reflections on sex. There's also a meta-textual reflection on the inner monologue:
"the fact that I just realized that when this monologue in my head finally stops, I'll be dead...
there are seven and a half billion people in the world, so there must be seven and a half billion of these internal monologues going on"
I noticed, before starting, one disgruntled Goodreads reviewer saying "no one has an internal monologue like this". I happened to also hear Naoise Dolan interviewed on her latest novel, and being asked whether her occassional use of internal monologue fit others'. She replied neatly that being autistic she has no comprehension of what goes on in anyone else's head. It takes the privilege of a straight white man to assume what that first reviewer does, and there's no one better than Naoise to tear those assumptions down.
When reading Ulysses I'd started, twenty years ago, not just with an annotated texts, but with two different reading guides. I made slow progress, wanting to understand every line of song, every play/musical, every street, etc. In Ducks, it's old films, and much less inspiring exhaustive lists of creeks and other geographic features. Oddly in the smaller interspersed sections on the mountain lion there's actually a coherent psychogeography, with a map provided at the back, but the main 950+ pages of monologue, broken only by commas (even questions have no punctuation) just doesn't motivate me to dig deeper. For the most part they're decorating the mundane.
The contrast between these everyday thoughts of a work-at-home mother with Trump-era gun and Police violence does work quite well. Ultimately, though, it's a huge tax on the reader's patience to make that work.
As one final note, it's interesting that the author mentioned Spanish flu, new pandemics and "the new normal". If you're going to read it, lockdown and before the next US election is the perfect time to dive in.
In fact I hadn't read all of Ulysses last September, and I set myself the task of finally reading that cover-to-cover first, which I finally achieved on New Year's Eve. I consequently decided to wait until I was 10 books ahead in a new reading challenge before tackling this (it's thanks to COVID-19 that I had the time to do so).
At times, indeed, it echoes Ulysses and in particular Bloom, for instance, in self-censored reflections on sex. There's also a meta-textual reflection on the inner monologue:
"the fact that I just realized that when this monologue in my head finally stops, I'll be dead...
there are seven and a half billion people in the world, so there must be seven and a half billion of these internal monologues going on"
I noticed, before starting, one disgruntled Goodreads reviewer saying "no one has an internal monologue like this". I happened to also hear Naoise Dolan interviewed on her latest novel, and being asked whether her occassional use of internal monologue fit others'. She replied neatly that being autistic she has no comprehension of what goes on in anyone else's head. It takes the privilege of a straight white man to assume what that first reviewer does, and there's no one better than Naoise to tear those assumptions down.
When reading Ulysses I'd started, twenty years ago, not just with an annotated texts, but with two different reading guides. I made slow progress, wanting to understand every line of song, every play/musical, every street, etc. In Ducks, it's old films, and much less inspiring exhaustive lists of creeks and other geographic features. Oddly in the smaller interspersed sections on the mountain lion there's actually a coherent psychogeography, with a map provided at the back, but the main 950+ pages of monologue, broken only by commas (even questions have no punctuation) just doesn't motivate me to dig deeper. For the most part they're decorating the mundane.
The contrast between these everyday thoughts of a work-at-home mother with Trump-era gun and Police violence does work quite well. Ultimately, though, it's a huge tax on the reader's patience to make that work.
As one final note, it's interesting that the author mentioned Spanish flu, new pandemics and "the new normal". If you're going to read it, lockdown and before the next US election is the perfect time to dive in.