Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 Booker-shortlisted novel Ducks, Newburyport reads like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy on steroids. This book is nearly one thousand pages, with more than nine hundred pages as the interior monologue of an unnamed middle-aged Ohio housewife. The interior monologue runs as one sentence.
Despite the daunting challenge of reading the book, I found it to be a literary masterpiece. Jane Austen wrote that that ”memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient—–at others, so bewildered and so weak—–at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control….”All these descriptive adjectives of memory are found in the outpouring of words of this Ohio housewife.
She is obsessed with life in what she perceives as a dystopic America. She is outraged with Trump, America’s history of Native American genocide, slavery and lynching of African Americans, American gun culture and the resultant mass killings. And those are just a few of her peeves.
She is the mother of four children; three from her present husband, whom she loves dearly. She is a competent baker who provides her pies and tarts to the stores in town. On the surface, her life seems normal, yet her thoughts drive her to the brink of terror with fear and anxiety.
Despite its dark side, there is much humor in the novel, especially in the wordplay. The author has an incredible knack of juxtaposing horrific and comedic images that create surreal landscapes throughout the book.
Lucy Ellmann spent much of her youth living in Evanston, where her father Richard Ellmann (the biographer of Joyce, Wilde and Yeats) taught at Northwestern. There are a few references to Evanston and the nearby Old Orchard Shopping Center in Skokie in the book, which especially piqued my interest since I live in Skokie. The author has been living the life of an American expatriate in the United Kingdom for nearly forty years. She currently lives in Scotland.
There is a second story in the book, interspersed alongside the interior monologue, told by a third-person narrator. It’s the story of a mountain lioness, who prowls the central Ohio countryside and suburbs searching for her lost cubs. This narration is written in a traditional structure of sentences and paragraphs. It is the protectiveness of these two mothers (human and animal) for their offspring that provides a unifying theme to the novel.
I believe that the adventurous and curious reader should give it a shot and read this most incredible literary achievement.
aliteraryreeder 