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A review by vg2
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
2.0
I was so looking forward to reading this novel - it sounded fascinating and very different to anything else on the market recently. Unfortunately, I had a number of issues with the book.
The first was how distracting reading ‘the fact that...’ thousands of times to denote a change in thought became. Would anyone use this exact phrase over and over again in their own head? It became so irritating and laboured that at times, I then missed the thought that it had preceded. In some cases, there were twenty, thirty repetitions of those same words in a page.
Secondly, this did not come across as a ‘stream of consciousness’. Surely no-one flits between thousands of unrelated thoughts so often, without any bridging. This unrealistic approach was exasperated by the choice to omit sentence demarcations - the structure of the book forces the reader to speed their reading up to an almost frantic pace, dismissing each thought as soon as it is expressed, rather than considering its meaning and what it tells us of our narrator. It made the reading experience almost stressful, as you move from unconnected thought to unconnected thought at a speed that no-one in real life would have. There were recurring themes - certain books, Laura Ingells Wilder, modern politics etc that cropped up again and again, but much of what came between blurred into an indistinct mass. I understand that this is a book oftentimes rooted in anxiety and fear, and that in itself can be a frantic experience, but this took it to an extreme, sustaining it for over a thousand pages.
The shame is that much of the content was interesting, or would have been had the threads been picked up and expanded at a more leisurely pace (when a thought was followed for more than a few words, it was engaging and far more relatable). I had hoped for a intimate experience - spending a thousand pages in the mind of a single narrator would seem to lend itself to that - by instead, it felt more like thousands of people had been put in a room, all calling out the first thought that came into their head simultaneously. Our narrator has many legitimate fears, complex relationships with others, a past marred by various life-defining issues and a present that isn’t quite the picture painted on the surface, but is let down by a structure and unnecessary length that never allows her voice to be truly explored. I felt more connected to the mountain lioness whose secondary narrative surfaces every hundred pages or so; those sections were beautifully crafted.
Needless to say, a bold novel which definitely had its moments, but overall more of a disappointment that felt a little pretentious.
The first was how distracting reading ‘the fact that...’ thousands of times to denote a change in thought became. Would anyone use this exact phrase over and over again in their own head? It became so irritating and laboured that at times, I then missed the thought that it had preceded. In some cases, there were twenty, thirty repetitions of those same words in a page.
Secondly, this did not come across as a ‘stream of consciousness’. Surely no-one flits between thousands of unrelated thoughts so often, without any bridging. This unrealistic approach was exasperated by the choice to omit sentence demarcations - the structure of the book forces the reader to speed their reading up to an almost frantic pace, dismissing each thought as soon as it is expressed, rather than considering its meaning and what it tells us of our narrator. It made the reading experience almost stressful, as you move from unconnected thought to unconnected thought at a speed that no-one in real life would have. There were recurring themes - certain books, Laura Ingells Wilder, modern politics etc that cropped up again and again, but much of what came between blurred into an indistinct mass. I understand that this is a book oftentimes rooted in anxiety and fear, and that in itself can be a frantic experience, but this took it to an extreme, sustaining it for over a thousand pages.
The shame is that much of the content was interesting, or would have been had the threads been picked up and expanded at a more leisurely pace (when a thought was followed for more than a few words, it was engaging and far more relatable). I had hoped for a intimate experience - spending a thousand pages in the mind of a single narrator would seem to lend itself to that - by instead, it felt more like thousands of people had been put in a room, all calling out the first thought that came into their head simultaneously. Our narrator has many legitimate fears, complex relationships with others, a past marred by various life-defining issues and a present that isn’t quite the picture painted on the surface, but is let down by a structure and unnecessary length that never allows her voice to be truly explored. I felt more connected to the mountain lioness whose secondary narrative surfaces every hundred pages or so; those sections were beautifully crafted.
Needless to say, a bold novel which definitely had its moments, but overall more of a disappointment that felt a little pretentious.