Ducks, Newburyport

Lucy Ellmann

Galley Beggar Press

Otago Daily Times, October 12th 2019

Man-Booker judges have a track record of rewarding ‘difficult’ or ‘literary’ novels, and if the jury remains true to form, Ducks, Newburyport must be among the frontrunners for this year’s prize. Rejected by Ellmann’s usual publisher and picked up by an independent publishing house specialising in ‘ambitious and unusual’ works, it is undoubtedly the most challenging book I have read this year.

The novel takes the form of a stream-of-consciousness monologue by an un-named Ohio woman as she struggles to balance the demands of running her home-based bakery and caring for four children, worries about the dangers of industrial toxins and men with guns, and waxes nostalgic for the wholesome, down-to-earth life romanticised by Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Amish community in Witness. Her ruminations range from matters of immediate concern – whether the cinnamon rolls are rising properly or how much the macho, gun-loving Trump supporter who delivers her chicken food exemplifies everything she detests about contemporary America – to commentaries on the old movies she watches as she bakes and memories of her childhood and much in between.

These transitory but relatively coherent lines of thought, interrupted by strings of word association, snatches of song, and a captivatingly poetic, multi-page list of predictions, form a single, unending sentence that runs the entirety of the novel. Interrupting it at irregular intervals is a tangential ­– and occasionally intersecting – circular journey of a lioness searching for her stolen cubs. Reflecting and refracting the central themes of the novel as a whole, these sections, which take a more conventional form complete with sentences, paragraphs and full stops, allow the actions that drive the plot (such as it is) to take place behind the scenes, leaving us to piece events together from our narrator’s responses when she returns mid-sentence to the stage.

As a reader plunged into such a full-immersion first-person view of the world, I found it an overwhelming and often uncomfortable experience:

The fact that it is presented as a continuous stream with no full stops full of random interjections, OMG, OCD, macrophage, tardigrade, crazee, the fact that this sets off a voice in my own head so that her thoughts and mine compete like radios set to different frequencies, amplitude cancellation, oscillation, standing wave, this is the way the world ends, the fact that this goes on and on and on and on and on with scarcely a pause FOR ALMOST ONE THOUSAND PAGES, the fact that makes it impossible to stop even as the sense of falling and losing myself entirely in her never-ending state of high anxiety becomes overwhelming, panic, don’t panic, 42.

This initial, vertiginous reaction subsided as I relaxed into the flow of the dialogue, eliding through (or, in the case of page-long lists of US rivers or desserts, skipping altogether) the random interjections, and I eventually found myself enjoying the puzzle-like assembly of the narrator’s story. She is smart and funny, and her thoughts, although fleeting, are full of small details that capture the essence of the character, from her youngest son’s refusal to eat anything that doesn’t have a hole in the middle to the fact that her lovingly inoffensive and largely absent husband Leo (spot the lion reference) has devoted his career to analysing the structural faults of bridges.

On the other hand, although she can bake a mean tarte-tatin, the woman literally cannot change a tyre to save her life, dammit. I became increasingly frustrated by her passivity and self-doubt, her repeated insistence that she was broken by her mother’s illness and her constant rumination about her failings as a daughter, mother, friend and wife. Terrified that she has passed her failings on to her children, and even when she faces down a real and immediate threat to her family, she remains unable to appreciate her own strength. Knowing that she is more of a mirror to my own insecurities than I want to acknowledge and that I ought to go easier on myself (which I suspect is Ellmanns point) doesn’t exactly help.

That said, Ducks, Newburyport is an impressive achievement that takes a masculine literary conceit (think Joyce, Faulkner, Coe) and adapts it oft-trivialised concerns of maternal life. And although this is not the first single-sentence novel to contend for the Man-Booker – Mike McCormack took that honour in 2017 with Solar Bones – it certainly deserves its place on the long-list. Whether she takes the prize or not, Ellmann has definitely captured the attention of the literary world.

https://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/magazine/bookers-dozen-long-and-short-it