Scan barcode
A review by grvhppr
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
Ducks, Newburyport is essentially a style-driven rendering of the "average American housewife" through a single-sentence, stream of consciousness telling of our main character's life. Through bizarre yet logical thought jumps the reader sews together her life like a great quilt. We learn about her every concern, passion, worry, opinion, relationship (personal and work related), etc. as the narrative is near breathless, which I think is representative of what a woman/housewife experiences--an onslaught of life compounded and compressed day after day with disappointments/rewards big and small.
From the narrative we know she's an Ohio stay at home baker with four children and a loving husband. And while the narrative seems like it would be boring to listen in on the daily ongoings of a piemaker, I never felt a desire to stop. I'm sure how this was possible but somehow Ellmann did it. This work is as large as the lives of the women represented by our main character because motherhood is in itself limitless. There are no real punctuations, only commas, only mini-moments of respite that build into something total.
Personal favorite scenes/multiple mentions:morning routines, Ronnie scenes, flat tires, and the mall flooding . The book is full of great moments and thought associations though so there's never a dull moment. While I'm not female, I still found the book resonant and easy to get into our main character's mind. It felt very real to me.
There's also a second narrative that follows a mountain lion that I LOVED.
If you're daunted by the size of this book, don't be. You can read it as fast or slow as you want and jump in right where you left off without missing a beat.
As for the name of the book, Ducks, Newburyport:Our housewife's mother almost drowned in a duck pond when she was young. If that had happened, then this whole story wouldn't exist, so I believe naming the book after a random small event that happened to her mother, it shows that lives/legacies can dramatically alter as easily as your next thought .
Lastly, I want to touch on "the fact that". My understanding of the 19,000+ uses of "the fact that" when starting a thought is an exploration on the difference between perspective and fact. We all live radically different lives it seems but we also share a lot of commonalities with one another. So by using "the fact that" Ellmann teases the contradiction between personal understanding and objective truth. We live life picking up facts that we internalize and morph into personal understandings of how the world works. It's how we stay sane in a world that has to make room for its billions of opinions of what's right and wrong.
From the narrative we know she's an Ohio stay at home baker with four children and a loving husband. And while the narrative seems like it would be boring to listen in on the daily ongoings of a piemaker, I never felt a desire to stop. I'm sure how this was possible but somehow Ellmann did it. This work is as large as the lives of the women represented by our main character because motherhood is in itself limitless. There are no real punctuations, only commas, only mini-moments of respite that build into something total.
Personal favorite scenes/multiple mentions:
There's also a second narrative that follows a mountain lion that I LOVED.
If you're daunted by the size of this book, don't be. You can read it as fast or slow as you want and jump in right where you left off without missing a beat.
As for the name of the book, Ducks, Newburyport:
Lastly, I want to touch on "the fact that". My understanding of the 19,000+ uses of "the fact that" when starting a thought is an exploration on the difference between perspective and fact. We all live radically different lives it seems but we also share a lot of commonalities with one another. So by using "the fact that" Ellmann teases the contradiction between personal understanding and objective truth. We live life picking up facts that we internalize and morph into personal understandings of how the world works. It's how we stay sane in a world that has to make room for its billions of opinions of what's right and wrong.