A review by graywacke
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

4.0

This is the thousand page stream-of-conscious sentence that came out last year, making the Booker long list and getting a lot of praise, although not universally. When I decided to pursue the Booker longlist, it immediately became the most intimidating book on my shorter TBR, and, as it wasn't available in audio*, would have to wait till I had time to actually read it all. No sneaking this one in during my commute. Somehow comments in my LibraryThing thread led to a (masochistic?) group read there.

So, what is this thing? That is not an easy question to answer. First, I think the narrative is unlike what we typically associate with stream of conscious. There is no real narrative break, it's one Ohio mother-of-four, home-baker-for-income's linear thought trend over the course of a short period. The breaks are her mind association transitions. What comes out is pouring of information and anxiety that readers need to figure out to...not how to understand, that isn't hard...but how to manage. Also, while there are no periods in our unnamed narrator's mind, there are breaks, with elegant prose, covering a separate story, unknown to our narrator, of mountain lion and her cubs managing limited wilderness in western Pennsylvania and Ohio. (Yes, there are mountain lions there - a few sightings every so often. Everything in the book is factual except the narrator's and mountain lion's stories.)

The lioness makes a nice counterpoint, as we see her clear thoughts, practical concerns while in constant danger or in a fragile exposed peace. Our anxiety-ridden narrator, however, doesn't exactly tell us what is going on. That's a little hard to explain without reading it, but we only find out the book's plot as it fits in what is actually a kind of secondary thought stream of conscious. That is we aren't really getting her main thoughts, we seem to be on some other layer, a place where, after spending 1000 pages, I still haven't quite identified yet - maybe something just on the conscious side of our conscious/unconscious thought boundary...but with some kind of intentional commentary in there.

So how was it? It was both moving and horrifying, it was also exhausting, deeply memorable, and admirable. The amount of anxiety and the negative info-dives make for interesting and tough reading, her troubles compounded into regional, national, global, historical, human, political and natural bad news, heaped on top of more intense bad news, sprinkled heavily with the most gut-wrenching headlines that skitter through, appearing and then immediately disappearing in the fog of words. When I say above readers must manage this book, they must manage the relentlessness of all this disheartening information, along with numerous fascinating factoids and stories too. A little Wikipedia potpourri. But there is a real human story in here too - our narrator, her entire set of worries completely exposed here, is also dealing with her four children and husband and health problems and her family. Most moving is her memories of her now deceased mother, and her mother's health crisis that happened while our narrator was just ready to leave the nest. These human relationships and their complications make a positive counter-force, the aspect that has more expansive feelings, and that makes this book beautiful... Well, I should add, there are some striking prose bits snuggled in here too.

As a reader my relationship with the book evolved over the six weeks I read it and the few days I've now been thinking about it. In the beginning I was really intrigued and then there was rhythm I could just pick up, skipping across words to make connections. Then it starts to get a little harder to read, and I was carried on a bit by the drive to finish (thank you group read). Then it becomes apparent I can't think about the book while I'm reading. There's too much information to process on the page, too much anxiety to loosen up and feel it, and I'm just going to have to wait. Then I started to a slow down, had a moment or two of exhaustion, but some late narrative drive carried me home. That overwhelming sense of too-much-information-can't-think was, for me, the hardest part of the book. Because in my own mind, in my own sort of parallel consciousness, I'm asking myself, it this worth it, should I be reading this, what am I reading this for...and I couldn't address those questions. But now I can.

Is it worth it? For me, yes, I'm grateful to have read it. Should I have spent 6 weeks (as the world was closing due to a pandemic rife why anxious unknowns)? I think so, I mean there is no other way. What was I reading this for? Just to get the end, I guess, to get the full experience of the book. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with all this now. But it will hang around, snugly ensconced in my reading psyche, distinct from everything else I've read. This is a curious experiment that I'm glad I took part of.

*it is now available on audio.

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17. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
published: 2019
format: 1040-page paperback
acquired: January
read: Mar 1 – Apr 8
time reading: 41 hr 47 min, 2.5 min/page
rating: 4
locations: Newcomerstown, Ohio
about the author An American-born British novelist based in Edinburgh, Scotland, born 18 October 1956 in Evanston, IL