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A review by halvy4
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
5.0
The first of Mike's Big Books 2021. If they all take this long it might be one of only two or three. You never realize how much space paragraph breaks and dialogue take up in a book until you read a book completely lacking them. Also contains very prominent Ohio representation, which we must love and respect in all forms.
An exercise in style first and foremost, this novel with the exception of interludes takes the form of one long sentence, broken up only by "the fact thats," consisting mostly of the internal monologue and word associations of an unnamed Ohio housewife. It never plunges into full nonsensical digression like Joyce would, committed to the perspective it inhabits, but there are page long lists of every river they can think of, long digressions on Little House in the Prairie, and enough word association games to make you feel like it might be nonsense anyway. That being said, I found the prose to really work for me, not necessarily because of brilliant individual clauses but because of the way they all flowed together. I am almost always entirely rhythm deaf when it comes to reading (or at least not actively conscious of rhythm), only really noticing it if something's particularly clunky (looking at you, Ernest Cline), but man are there passages of this that flow together beautifully and cohere into much more than sum of the parts because of the way they roll off the tongue (or the brain, in this case). If you can get past the original shock of the way this is written, Ducks, Newburyport is actually pretty easy to slide into and enjoy and will almost certainly enter your own head and monologue at some point.
The interludes themselves are pretty unremarkable, following a mountain lion, but they primarily work as a contrast to the flowing prose of the narrator, a series of quick, terse, to the point page long interruptions. The contrast is simple- the mountain lion is worried about two things, getting her next meal and taking care of her cubs, while our housewife is worried about any number of things at any given time- school shooters, Open Carry guys, whether she is permanently broken by her mother's death, the relationship dynamics of classic movies she watches while she bakes, her own shyness, Trump's relationship with Melania whether she's a good mother, whether she neglected her eldest daughter while she was dating her now husband, the extinction of various species of animals, whether her kid's will inherit her shyness, et cetera et cetera. The point is rather obvious, that the age of information is too overwhelming for any human to process healthily, it all spurting out of us in the form of various neuroses and pet concerns and favorite books and movies through which we see our own lives through the lens of.
The narration doesn't feel real but it does feel true, hyperreal, an exaggerated reflection of our own familiar thought processes, our own inability to handle the waves of information that cascade toward us everyday, the inability to identify any real sort of signal from the noise of modern reality taken to an absurd conclusion. That being said, this is not disrespectful to its narrator (or at least I do not perceive it to be). If anything, it is a celebration of her perspective, one that would usually be perceived as "boring", especially in the literary world: a housewife, mother of 4, who stays at home all day baking. There are points where this goes from abstract digression about something or another (i.e., what you would stereotypically expect a housewife to do all day) to something emotional from her past that are breathtaking in the way they transition and the amount of emotion they leave the reader with because of the way it breaks up an otherwise mundane part of her existence. This book clearly holds that this perspective, that the internal monologue and the lives of the "boring," is as worthy of respect, as interesting a collection of idiosyncrasies and personal tragedies, grand successes and tragic failures, as any other perspective.
At least a part of this is an elevation of domestic labor, on the difficulties of it as well as the dignity of it. Our housewife spends most of her time either baking, cleaning up after her children, or taking care of her children, and it makes you feel and understand the amount of time and effort that goes into managing a household without real help from her husband (her husband is mostly away on work travel throughout this). I spent a number of pages of this wanting to apologize to my mother for not helping around the house more when I was a kid.
All that being said, interpreting this and saying any of it definitively can feel like a bit of a fruitless exercise. This many pages with this much packed in and not much didacticism to be found makes this at least somewhat of a rorschach test for the reader, which can be obnoxious if done poorly but this works well and there's enough there to leave plenty to chew on and wrestle with it.
I did really enjoy it but the 1000 pages is quite intimidating. I was into it for most of its length but there weren't points where I was a little fed up. If I'm being honest, you can probably read the first 150 pages and the last 150 pages and get 85% of the same experience, which makes that probably my recommendation for people not already 100% sold by the description of the novel.
SPOILERS
Still split on the ending of this one. Feels simultaneously like the only way this book could end and also like the author flinching away from their own premise. The latter because this book spends 950 pages dedicated almost entirely to the narrator's interior life, her perspective, the way she sees her day to day life, to the point of basically being a book without a plot, that to end on what is basically an action set piece feels like almost a copout. The former because while nothing really happens, there are a number of small disasters happening throughout the book, and this is a book that primarily finds itself in the narrator's worries it only makes sense that her biggest ones become manifest at the end. The more I think about it the more I lean toward a positive view of the ending. The horrors and atrocities we've inflicted on the natural world are coming quickly for the human one in ways big and small, and the coming awfulness and the excitement that comes with it may be the only thing that breaks our neurotic information-infested existence.
An exercise in style first and foremost, this novel with the exception of interludes takes the form of one long sentence, broken up only by "the fact thats," consisting mostly of the internal monologue and word associations of an unnamed Ohio housewife. It never plunges into full nonsensical digression like Joyce would, committed to the perspective it inhabits, but there are page long lists of every river they can think of, long digressions on Little House in the Prairie, and enough word association games to make you feel like it might be nonsense anyway. That being said, I found the prose to really work for me, not necessarily because of brilliant individual clauses but because of the way they all flowed together. I am almost always entirely rhythm deaf when it comes to reading (or at least not actively conscious of rhythm), only really noticing it if something's particularly clunky (looking at you, Ernest Cline), but man are there passages of this that flow together beautifully and cohere into much more than sum of the parts because of the way they roll off the tongue (or the brain, in this case). If you can get past the original shock of the way this is written, Ducks, Newburyport is actually pretty easy to slide into and enjoy and will almost certainly enter your own head and monologue at some point.
The interludes themselves are pretty unremarkable, following a mountain lion, but they primarily work as a contrast to the flowing prose of the narrator, a series of quick, terse, to the point page long interruptions. The contrast is simple- the mountain lion is worried about two things, getting her next meal and taking care of her cubs, while our housewife is worried about any number of things at any given time- school shooters, Open Carry guys, whether she is permanently broken by her mother's death, the relationship dynamics of classic movies she watches while she bakes, her own shyness, Trump's relationship with Melania whether she's a good mother, whether she neglected her eldest daughter while she was dating her now husband, the extinction of various species of animals, whether her kid's will inherit her shyness, et cetera et cetera. The point is rather obvious, that the age of information is too overwhelming for any human to process healthily, it all spurting out of us in the form of various neuroses and pet concerns and favorite books and movies through which we see our own lives through the lens of.
The narration doesn't feel real but it does feel true, hyperreal, an exaggerated reflection of our own familiar thought processes, our own inability to handle the waves of information that cascade toward us everyday, the inability to identify any real sort of signal from the noise of modern reality taken to an absurd conclusion. That being said, this is not disrespectful to its narrator (or at least I do not perceive it to be). If anything, it is a celebration of her perspective, one that would usually be perceived as "boring", especially in the literary world: a housewife, mother of 4, who stays at home all day baking. There are points where this goes from abstract digression about something or another (i.e., what you would stereotypically expect a housewife to do all day) to something emotional from her past that are breathtaking in the way they transition and the amount of emotion they leave the reader with because of the way it breaks up an otherwise mundane part of her existence. This book clearly holds that this perspective, that the internal monologue and the lives of the "boring," is as worthy of respect, as interesting a collection of idiosyncrasies and personal tragedies, grand successes and tragic failures, as any other perspective.
At least a part of this is an elevation of domestic labor, on the difficulties of it as well as the dignity of it. Our housewife spends most of her time either baking, cleaning up after her children, or taking care of her children, and it makes you feel and understand the amount of time and effort that goes into managing a household without real help from her husband (her husband is mostly away on work travel throughout this). I spent a number of pages of this wanting to apologize to my mother for not helping around the house more when I was a kid.
All that being said, interpreting this and saying any of it definitively can feel like a bit of a fruitless exercise. This many pages with this much packed in and not much didacticism to be found makes this at least somewhat of a rorschach test for the reader, which can be obnoxious if done poorly but this works well and there's enough there to leave plenty to chew on and wrestle with it.
I did really enjoy it but the 1000 pages is quite intimidating. I was into it for most of its length but there weren't points where I was a little fed up. If I'm being honest, you can probably read the first 150 pages and the last 150 pages and get 85% of the same experience, which makes that probably my recommendation for people not already 100% sold by the description of the novel.
SPOILERS
Still split on the ending of this one. Feels simultaneously like the only way this book could end and also like the author flinching away from their own premise. The latter because this book spends 950 pages dedicated almost entirely to the narrator's interior life, her perspective, the way she sees her day to day life, to the point of basically being a book without a plot, that to end on what is basically an action set piece feels like almost a copout. The former because while nothing really happens, there are a number of small disasters happening throughout the book, and this is a book that primarily finds itself in the narrator's worries it only makes sense that her biggest ones become manifest at the end. The more I think about it the more I lean toward a positive view of the ending. The horrors and atrocities we've inflicted on the natural world are coming quickly for the human one in ways big and small, and the coming awfulness and the excitement that comes with it may be the only thing that breaks our neurotic information-infested existence.