Lucy EllmannReseñas

Heartbreaking. What an experience.

I found this a bit patchy and repetitive. I can't remember great detail now, but sometimes it really got going into an enjoyable rant, but other times was a bit more of a slog.½

No idea how to rate this! The fact that Ellmann's so often so spot on just reinforces the depressing nature of what humanity's done (and continues to do) to itself, and humor and determination can only go so far in bringing you back from the resulting dumps.

Oh my god, really? I'm 100 pages in and I want to shoot myself in head to put me out of my misery. What the hell am I reading? Shortlisted? Yikes.

That was so.long. I think I overall enjoyed this, it's a stream of consciousness book with basically no plot. A middle aged mother in Ohio in about 2017. There are no paragraphs or sentences, every new thought just begins "the fact that..." There are endless lists and word associations, and truly just an encyclopedic narration of this woman's mind. There are many cultural touchstones that she keeps coming back to, Laura Ingles-Wilder's books being one of them which I'm more familiar with. A lot of commentary on Trump, and violence in America.
This is more boiled-down than a real person's actual stream of thought. Unless I'm the odd one out, a huge chunk of my waking thoughts is just a running list of what I have to do, what I have to remember, what everyone needs around me. I'm glad that was left out though, I don't need to hear how many loads of laundry someone else is doing in addition to my own.
There's a running mini-story of a mountain lion that pops up every now and then, separate from the run-on string of thoughts. The lion stalks prey, protects her cubs, is hunted and captured, injured, and ends up in captivity with her cubs. I don't really know what was meant by that, but to me it shows how a mother would prefer to be focused on raising her children until the violence of the outside world invades. That seems to run parallel to the thoughts of our narrator throughout.
If you're into experimental literature, you might check this out.

DAMN. Yes. Wow. Behold: the least articulate review I may ever have offered, for one of the best books I've read this year.

the fact that I almost didn’t want this book to end, the fact that I needed to get back to my real life, the fact that it was convincing, engrossing, suspenseful, amusing, devastating, the fact that lone mountain lions have been spotted twice in Des Moines in recent years, the fact that I don’t think they were lionesses...

The fact that this thing is a doorstop, thick, brick, hard to hold open, took 5 months to finish, the fact that as you get further and further along you realize this woman doesn’t even know about Parkland because it hasn’t happened yet, let alone COVID-19, the fact that she doesn’t know about half of the terrible things Trump ended up doing as president, QAnon, insurrection, gun violence, the world actually got much worse, you wonder how many more pages would there be, the fact that despite the escalating horrors the social and cultural observations are precise and comprehensive, all of it there, up to the moment, spot-on, sickeningly accurate, deadly accurate, right on the money, the fact that the lurking danger, ominous threat, is brought home, arives up close and personal, the fact that there is bravery and heroism alongside the brutality, corruption, and ignorance, the fact that we’re all broken, the fact that this book feels inevitable, the fact that someone had to write this, it was necessary, the fact is that I loved Ducks, Newburyport.

Amazing.

A singular, unique, and amazing work that shows a whole human being in the right now.

Sometimes Cruel but Sometimes Funny & Thoughtful Rants
Review of the Galley Beggar Press buddies edition (2021)

[2.65] average bumped up to [3]
Fourteen essays by the writer of the 1000-page Booker nominated Ducks, Newburyport (2019), which I have made 3 unsuccessful attempts to read, usually giving up between pages 50 to 100. These bite-sized pieces are easier to get through and often funny, but in a cruel schadenfreude or bitter, envious curmudgeonly sort of way. Some are so over the top that it makes me think this is a persona adopted for comic effect only. i.e. can someone hate Americans, mystery novels, travel, electronic appliances etc. this much in real life?

1. Things Are Against Us. (2021) * A rant against THINGS, a proxy for anything that bedevils one's existence. A one-page joke that goes on for twelve pages.
2. The Underground Bunker. (2019, Irish Times [edited to include the Jan. 6, 2021 US Capital riot]) **** An anti-Trump & anti-deplorables rant, but funny. Rather brutally contemptuous about America. See 2 extended quotes below.
3. Trapped Family Fingers. (2019, Globe & Mail) **** More of the same as 2. See 1 short quote below. Bonus points for the Trapp Family Singers/The Sound of Music parody.
4. Three Strikes. (2015, The Baffler) ***** Inspired by Three Guineas (1938) by Virginia Woolf. This is the most interesting essay of the book and covers many of its themes e.g. money confiscation as in 14. It has an infuriating amount of footnotes printed in microscopic font, but you can read it online and save your eyes at The Baffler (March 2015).
5. A Spell of Patriarchy. (2019, NYTimes) *** Viewing Spellbound (1945) dir. Alfred Hitchcock in hindsight as a MeToo precursor movie.
6. Third-Rate Zeros. (2021) *** OK, we get it, you don't like Trump.
7. Consider Pistons and Pumps. (2016, The Baffler) ** Viewing everyday machine objects as phallic or vaginal symbols.
8. The Woman in the House. (2012, The Guardian) *** Reading The Little House on the Prairie series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder as a frontier feminist epic.
9. The Lost Art of Staying Put. (2017, The Baffler) ** A rant against world travellers.
10. Bras - A Life Sentence. (2000, Deliberately Thirsty) ** A rant against the title subject.
11. Morning Routine Girls. (2015, The Baffler) ** A cruel rant against the "morning routine" videos on YouTube. The idea of these make me feel pity rather than wanting to mock misguided young women.
12. Sing the Unelectric!. (2013, Aeon Magazine) **** Promoting minimalism and non-electric appliances.
13. Ah, Men. (2021) * A rant against men and then against the mystery and crime genre, which, as far as I appreciate it, was and is dominated by women writers esp. in the golden age 1920-1930s and in the present day.
14. Take The Money Honey. (2019, The Evergreen) *** More on the money confiscation theme.

I read Things Are Against Us in its limited edition grey-cover release available to supporters of the Galley Beggar Press' Galley Buddy subscription program.

Quotes:

“Americans are acutely unaware of the past and the future. Also, the present. History is infinitely malleable for them. So is reality. Are they just undereducated, indoctrinated, chronically indifferent, hypnotised, or too damn busy makin’ a buck? Consumed by consumerism, they wallow in army fatigues and self-regard, coveting the next dynamite Apple doodad or an AK-47, plasma screen and some Nikes. They have worried everybody and ruined the earth, all so that they can prance around, effect insouciance, drink beer, watch football, guzzle Sloppy Joes and Oreos, wear pro-Auschwitz sweatshirts, make pipe bombs, absorb incessant rock music, object to positive discrimination and the public display of female nipples, wonder whether the mailman has shut the mailbox properly, and choose a new euphemism for excretion yearly.”
― from The Underground Bunker in Things Are Against Us

“The United States of America has now reached a whole new level of patriarchal absurdity. You mean they massacred the Indians, enslaved the Africans, cut down all the trees, poisoned all the rivers, and extinguished or imprisoned all the animals for THIS, this hellhole of bombast and hamburgers and opioid addictions and cardboard-box houses and pretend ideas? You mean they used up all the oxygen on 4th of July firecrackers and forcing kids to pledge allegiance to the flag every goddam day, drank Coke till they choked, spat tobaccy till they puked, fought cancer (but only for people with lots of money), nestled in Nestlés, slurped slurpees, burped burpees, handed on herpes, Tasered the wayward, jailed the frail and tortured about a million billion chickens (then fried and ate them), just so people can drive around and shoot each other and create GoFundMe sites to pay the hospital bills?
- from The Underground Bunker in Things Are Against Us

“What riches there once were, what beauties! Raindrops on roses and crop tops on cuties. Now it's just tear gas and water hoses, and Mexican children tied up with strings. These are a few of their favourite things. Quarry every mountain, wreck every stream.”
― from Trapped Family FIngers in Things Are Against Us

Lucy Ellmann has a reputation for being an excruciatingly funny writer. It’s all been in novels, award-winning novels. Seven of them. Now, she has published Things Are Against Us, a collection of 14 essays, four of which have never been published before. Not being big on novels, this is my first exposure to her work.

It is angry. Ellmann complains about everything, and every aspect of everything. Even the TOC is labeled the Table of Discontents. Outside of orgasms and money, nothing seems to rate for her. She is against electricity. She is against travel. She is against teens explaining their morning routines on youtube. Mostly, she is against men. She sums up men early on:
“What riches there once were, what beauties! Raindrops on roses and crop tops on cuties. Now it’s just tear gas and water hoses, and Mexican children tied up with strings. These are a few of their favourite things. Quarry every mountain, wreck every stream.”

At times, it can be termed satirical. In by far her longest essay, she proposes a three strikes and you’re out series – of strikes against men. Her evidence of the need is with things like: “Men obliterate beavers so they can build their own dams! “

Strike one is withholding housework, since no man has any clue how to do it himself. Along the way, she declares a moratorium on discussing anyone’s looks. During the strike, there is to be no talking about anyone’s appearance for one year. “The beauteous would survive a slight lessening of attention and acclaim, and the rest of us could relax. After a year of such abstinence I’d bet we’d be cured of the habit and be much better conversationalists.“

Strike two is no more war work, which soon devolves into just no work at all. She specifies to “withhold women’s labour in the workforce, because after all, who wants to WORK?” (Her caps.)

Strike number three is the good old withholding of sex, from the playbook of the Ancient Greeks. Money for sex is the aim, a theme Ellmann comes back to in later essays as well. It’s all about the money, ultimately. She wants men to fork over all their money and let women run the world. This comes up throughout the book.
Three strikes and they’re out of wealth and power. And if that doesn’t work, there is a fourth strike she is holding in reserve: pizza. Ellmann hates pizza (too), and insists all women hate it. Men force it on them, whenever possible. Prevent pizza, and you can rule the world. Apparently.

That all this conflicts directly with her complaints about women spending so much time on fashion, makeup and jewelry, presumably to obtain favors from men, is not broached. We wouldn’t want sense to interfere with the essence of these essays.

This essay, called simply Three Strikes. is both improved and hobbled by an astonishing amount of footnotes. The footnotes are a good five times as long as the essay. It makes for very choppy reading, trying to make both streams work at the same times. The footnotes are full of references to books, websites, newspaper and magazine articles to back her anecdotal charges, which is good. But as literature, it needs work.

Things Are Against Us is the title of both the book and the first essay. The essay is about THINGS. The word THINGS is always capitalized, and appears seemingly hundreds of times, as virtually every little THING is grating, annoying, defective or malevolent. THINGS are out to get her, much like Woody Allen’s early battles with appliances. It is a jarring read, and brings up Ellmann’s mains stylistic tic – lists. She loves long lists of items to complain about. She can be creative with them, making them rhyme, or listing the items alphabetically, or adding something bizarrely irrelevant to break them up. But they do seem endless. The lists can be nouns, verbs or adjectives; doesn’t help. They quickly become predictable and forgettable.

She reminds me specifically of James Thurber, who used to do this in some of the hundreds of essays he published, mainly in the New Yorker. Thurber would write about a letter of the alphabet, or a topic of general interest, or of someone in his family. He would make lists; he would exhaust the subject. It got to be very unfunny and most tiresome.

Ellmann differentiates herself though, because she has created a persona to do all the complaining and expand on the bitterness. This nasty character can be as obnoxious as Ellmann wants her to be, and get away with it. The persona does not have to be rational, logical or even conscious of how obnoxious she is. She has created a distinct character. Think of Jack Benny being stingy. Or WC Fields hating small children. Or Bill Dana being a Mexican immigrant. Or Brent Terhune being a right wing extremist. Well done, Lucy Ellmann.

For Ellmann, a Midwesterner now living in Scotland, it began when she was a child, learning that Lake Erie was officially dead: no plants or animals could exist there any more. “This developed into a disdain for fashion, new buildings, the space program, tree surgery, polyester, pharmaceutical companies, men with short hair, witch-burning, and the Industrial Revolution.” It doesn’t have to make sense; a lot of people find this hilarious. You have to go with it.

Here and there she makes good points, of course. Men have trashed the planet (though she provides no evidence women would have done better). After that, they are going to Mars to do the same. Or this: “Who in hell cares about Robert Oppenheimer’s conscience, one of the tiniest things in the universe. Nuclear bombs should never have been produced. “

On the other hand, she seems to have some predilections that really need explaining. Pizza, for one. Crime fiction, she says, is an obscenity, and not reading it is a feminist act. She thinks everyone should stay home, because everyone now has the world at their fingertips: “You’re nothing as an artist these days unless you’ve spent a month in New Mexico, the Arctic, Trinidad, Tibet and Sumatra, and regularly attend the Venice Biennale. People forget that reality is wherever you are. It’s what you’re thinking about that matters.” So for Ellmann, Van Gogh would have been better off never discovering Provence and staying in rainy Belgium instead. In some way, this is both wacko and sidesplittingly funny.

There’s a very odd essay on teenage girls making youtube videos of their morning routines. Ellmann attacks viciously, as usual, calling them shallow, friendless shills for consumer products and so on. I’m sure she would have been one of them had it been possible in her time. I can’t imagine why she bothers to spend so much vitriol on these kids. Young people will reach for the stars however they can. Boys will go after sports scholarships, for a possible stint as a national sports star, for example.

(Maybe that’s Ellmann’s next subject? Oh, I can see it already: “These humongous sixteen year olds, strutting the streets with their thumbs hitting their sides, because their egregious upper bodies are so out of proportion their arms can’t hang properly. Their entire left arms are festooned with blue tattoos so dense their arms look like they’ve been mangled in one of those old-fashioned wringer washing machines men invented to keep women in their place. These boys’ necks are as big as my thigh, which is really saying something with all the pizza I’ve been force fed against my will over the years. They are proto-men, whose only thought is to induce severe concussion in other proto-men, are the future leaders of the world if we don’t stop them now.” That, in a nutshell, is what an Ellmann essay reads like.)

If social media is how young women see the fastest path to success, it’s because there is plenty of precedent. They are right. Good luck to them. The only reason I can think of for her cruelty is the laughs she will get from some readers. She’s like a Don Rickles of literature – the more vile the attacks, the funnier it all seems?

Another good fat target is available in A Spell of Patriarchy, yet another essay oozing hate: “Women now bring home the bacon and cook it too. And men praise us for our autonomy – which leaves them free to watch their requisite ten hours of porn a day, decide on gender quotas, and pollute rivers.” Here, once again, she slams the upper body strength of men, which is one of those THINGS that infuriate her throughout the book.

So while I appreciate the work Ellmann has put into creating this hateful persona, I don’t think I’ll be reading much more of it.

David Wineberg

Brilliant. A literary feat. Puzzling. Beautiful and moving. The protagonist, c'est moi. I will need to reflect before I go on.

I made it to page 63 (13 pages past the point where I usually decide to give up on a book), but I just couldn't adjust to the writing style. Little had happened by that point to grab my attention.

Ages ago I read "Dot In the Universe" and liked it enough to still have it on my shelves (though I can't remember a thing about it). So when I saw "Mimi" at a library book sale recently, I grabbed it Loved it. The first part, with all its crazy love- and lust-related bits, reminded me of Peter DeVries. Then, about halfway through, on the heels of a zany scene involving the narrator, his ex-girlfriend and Mimi, comes this unforeseen and devastating plot twist, and it leads into a wonderful, more poignant second half about the narrator and his sister. The end of the story goes over the top, but I can live with that to get the wonderful other stuff in this novel. One of the passages I marked: When you're a kid, you don't really know if you're going to *survive* boredom. It feels life-threatening. Bee and I played I Spy and Ghost, but there were long stretches when she just stared out the window at her imaginary stallion, Hollenius, who was apparently galloping beside our car the whole way. I was life to glare at the brown semicircle of my mom's head, just visible over the front seat, or else chortle my way through my joke book, with which I tormented my family for years.

See my review in Rain Taxi Review of Books: http://www.raintaxi.com/volume-24-number-4-winter-2019-96/

I am not convinced by the male main character or even by the plot. His tendency of writing endless lists that meander through the book covers up the rather thin plot that even in its wild dramatic turns comes across as contrived. The only redeeming grace was the honest portrayal of what kinds of people feel the need to go to a plastic surgeon - and those parts were intense and heartbreaking.

Why did this running litany of anxieties keep me engaged for 1000 pages (a nearly 48hr audiobook) during a pandemic? I think Ellman pulls this off by including plenty of humor, going all in on the depth of the narrator, and establishing a cadence with the run-on formalism. I really enjoyed it, but honestly I don't know who I would recommend it to.

What a book! An apparent free-association, the book'll likely be annoying to folks who prefer more straightforward narratives, but Ellmann here writes in a remarkable brain voice that remained compelling to me for the full 1000ish pages. It's the compulsive, relentless, self-edited voice much more than the fairly thin plot that makes this book a marvel.

A shy Ohio woman lives her life. She cares for her four children, her chickens and her husband. She bakes pies and cinnamon rolls for local businesses. And she thinks about things, her family, her past, random thoughts about Ohio history or bridges or how to gracefully turn away the man who delivers her chicken feed. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann follows her suburban woman’s thoughts as they scatter and swing back around, but only when she’s busy with the mindless tasks of housekeeping, pie baking and childcare. So events are not lived through, but thought about after, in a disjointed, non-linear way. This narrative is broken up — it’s not just one long sentence — with an account the life of a lioness, functioning as a sort of palate cleanser along the way.

This was a novel that grew on me as I read. It’s an intense experiment in stream-of-consciousness that was not entirely successful for me. I’ve read other deeply interior novels that more effectively put me into a character’s head, but there was something to this one, something that, when my mood was right and I wasn’t tired or distracted, made me savor every single word. It’s also a novel that grew on me over time so that by the end I was sorry to see it finished.

The style that this novel is written in seems simple, but given that I read more than a few reviews in which the author chose to ape Ellman’s style, I can say that what Ellmann pulled off was impressive. Badly done stream-of-consciousness is impossible to read without a great deal of eye-rolling.½

Calling this at 72%, after 6 weeks of struggle - normally I would not take credit for that, but I have read roughly 750 pages, so credit I shall take -

Have you ever known someone, perhaps a co-worker or a parent at your kid's school, who you knew was a good person, a smart person, but their small-mindedness, their anxiety, their pathological timidity was so on display 100% of the time that you find yourself seizing every possible opportunity to avoid interacting with them? Only when you accidentally catch their eye do you take a deep breath, paste a smile on your face and engage? If the answer to that is yes, have you ever wanted to spend 1000+ pages in their head? Of course you haven't, because inside their head is a terrible place. This book launches you into the belly of that beast (assuming brains have bellies.) It assaults you with page after page of an anxiety fever dream interspersed with some legitimately funny observations, a great deal of grief, the political discourse of a 23-year old Democratic Socialist from a good college, a boatload of trivia, a cavalcade of remembered scenes from black and white movies, glimpses of a not-particularly good spouse who is almost certainly having an affair (though who can blame him), and various children and townsfolk, none of whom seem to be getting what they need from life. And yes, the vast majority of this happens in one long 1000+ page "sentence" (which is actually made up of many sentences where the periods are substituted with the phrase, "the fact that.") Much is made of the single sentence, but I actually rather liked the form which pulled you into that damaged brain. That was certainly the goal, and it was certainly accomplished. Sadly, the content of the brain made manifest was a problem for me. And that was only half the problem.

This woman is supposed to be in her early 40's, but she would actually have to be in her 50s or 60s. First of all, the times of yore she remembers in her trips down memory lane to her childhood with Mommy (ick) would have happened in the 50's or 60's based on the ways in which people acted and interacted which would make her 60ish. But if she is in her 40's, these charming memories of olden times would have happened in the 80's and 90's. It is completely anachronistic. Also, women in their 40' have asses, butts, bums which they do not refer to as their "sit-me-down upons." Women in their 40's have vaginas, vulvae, pussies, and twats which they do not refer to as their "me-oh-mys." Maybe women in their 70's would do that, but 40's, no. I wanted to fling the book across the room every time she said "me-oh-my." Of course I didn't because I was reading this on a Kindle, but the sentiment was there. This woman's prissiness, her primness her passionate embrace of repression makes her a lousy parent, a lousy wife, and a miserable person. There is one point she is talking about her eldest daughter who is the biological child of her first husband, and she says she never mentions the father to the daughter because it is unpleasant. I mean seriously, what kind of parent makes their kid bear the brunt of abandonment on her own rather than being uncomfortable? And speaking of bad mothering, I don't know much about the author, but I am willing to bet a lot that she is not a mother, because her observations on mothering are so off-base it reads like an alien reporting on earthling parenting. Her understanding of what kids do at what ages are WAY off base. (Also, where were her kids? Other than needing rides places they seem to leave her alone to bake and watch old movies. This would never happen.)

The repeated Britishisms also made me crazy. (Or as she would write "crazee" though it makes no sense for her to spell cleverly when these are not supposed to be written words but rather stream of consciousness thoughts. Your thoughts don't use clever spelling -- you don't think, hey that is really crazy, its so crazy it is crazy with a double-e, its crazee!) This is a housewife in Ohio, and despite spending a year in England as a child she would not call athletic shoes "trainers". She would call the fruit "blackberries" and not "blacksberries." There are more of these, a fair number. This is just bad editing --Ohio housewives don't use British slang.

Overall this kept me more engaged than I expected, I was impressed with it as a writing exercise. I liked the way Ellmann swirled around the point - starting with seemingly disjointed thoughts and bringing us, through repetition and increasingly complete phrases, to a clear narrative. Really impressive. But, there was so much wrong with this, so much that rang inauthentic to me (I say this as a parent, and American, an academic, a daughter who lost her parents, and an ex-spouse who kept a lot of secrets) that the whole fell apart. In order to want to spend more time inside this ball of anxiety the whole had feel more real. Points for the writing acrobatics, especially the funny ones and for the great use of metaphor.

249 days! It took me 249 days to finish this tome. There were many stops and starts along the way. Sometimes, I'd put this book aside just to read something else. I may have had a rotational checkout of this book with three different public libraries within 60 miles. At seven months in, I was at page 452 and I didn't see the point of going on. I put the book in the "to-go" box and didn't look back.

Within a couple of days, I changed my mind. I didn't know if the reward would be worth it, but I wouldn't know if I didn't try. I committed to fifteen pages a day. I could finish Duck, Newburyport in thirty days. And that's what I did.

I really don't know what to say about this book. I will say it's an experience. Was the reward worth it? No, I didn't think so. It's like being promised a grand vacation as a child and arriving to find out that the descriptions of your destination were vastly exaggerated. It only took seven months of "Are we there yet?" One thousand pages of "Are we there yet?" 19,396 "the fact that"'s of "Are we there yet?"

And yet... there was something mesmerizing about this work. It's as if the long car ride were the point of the journey. And what was the car ride? Well, it was the scenery. It was the rhythm of the tires on the road. But it was long.

There was one thing that personally annoyed me at no end that I haven't heard others mention. Ellmann's narrator is constantly bringing up movies, talking about them as though the reader has any idea what she's talking about. I was familiar with very few of them. She doesn't explain the references, just jumps right into talking about them, which is expected from a stream-of-conscious narrative, but is terribly taxing on a reader who has no idea what she's talking about. And they go on for pages: It's Complicated, Jane Fonda, Air Force One, Paul Henreid... It was the part of the journey where your parents turn on the kind of music you most hate and sing along. Combining all the movie references with The Little House on the Prairie references, and you've probably got more than 10% of the book. That might not normally be an issue, but we're talking about a thousand page book here. You know, some of us still read books.

Ducks, Newburyport is unforgettable and certainly an accomplishment for readers who make it through. It's not a book I'd recommend to very many readers (or maybe any). Honestly, I don't think I will ever again hear that one phrase and not think of this book.

I am in awe of Ellmann's talent. This book is an incredible ride.

I was pretty excited to dig into Ducks, Newburyport, as it's a bit out of my wheelhouse due to its recent release date. I don't read a lot of current literature due to my embarrassing backlog. Having just made my way through its thousand or so pages, I can't help but feel disappointed.

Much as been made of DN's length, writing style, etc., but for the uninitiated: DN tells the story of a modern-day housewife/mother/small-town baker-for-hire's life over a short span of time. The hook is that it's told exclusively from her point of view via an uninterrupted, unedited stream of consciousness style. It's also comprised of a single sentence without any full stops across its thousand pages (arguable - more on this later). Interspersed between our protagonist's running monologue is a story about a female mountain lion caring for her cubs.

The immediate comparison that jumps to mind is to Ulysses, and the critical discussion surrounding the book is full of references to Joyce's masterwork. However, I consider these comparisons horribly off-target and unfair. If author Lucy Ellmann attempted to call Ulysses to mind (and I'm not sure she did), then DN is an outright failure.

A novel like this must be discussed in two parts: the writing, and the content of the novel (plot, characters, etc.). MILD SPOILER: There isn't a whole lot of plot or action between these covers, so the writing is left with the task of carrying the audience through the massive duration. And this is the book's greatest problem: the writing itself does very little to hold the reader's attention.

First, let's talk about that whole "single-sentence" structure that people make such a big deal about. It's true, there is a single, solitary full stop at the end of the interior monologue that comprises 98% of the book. But is that the only distinguishing feature of a single sentence? That it doesn't have a period until the end? After reading this book, I'm of the opinion that the "one sentence" structure is misleading. Commas separate the clauses, but they're each an independent thought and often have no real relation to each other. When I think of a sentence with multiple clauses, I think of them somehow depending on each other and actually having some sort of overarching goal or reason that they're strung together. That's not the case here. Here's a fabricated example: "The fact that people say this book has one sentence, the fact that I'm not so sure about that, the fact that I probably disagree, the fact that I disagree about a lot of things, the fact that I don't feel good, the fact that I'm hungry all of a sudden." It's one sentence in that there is no full stop, but that's really the only reason it should be considered a single sentence, and it's a pretty shallow one.

Am I asking too much of a novel already this ambitious? Probably. I can't imagine how one would write a book even a tenth of this long comprised of a true single sentence, where different thoughts and statements are actually nested and relate to each other. However, it's what I expected, as the structure comes up in every review or synopsis ever written about this Ducks, Newburyport. I'd change that discourse to make the much less ambitious claim: "Ducks, Newburyport only has one full stop." Doesn't that seem less exciting? It should.

Another gimmick about the book's writing is that nearly every statement made in this interior monologue begins with "the fact that..." That also intrigued me - how will this thousand-page novel develop its admittedly meager plot via a simple list of facts? Bad news: it doesn't. Many of the statements aren't actually facts. And many of them don't start with this ceaseless refrain for any discernible reason, to the point of grammatical nonsense, e.g., "the fact that why am I reading this." What does that sentence even mean?

So if the writing can't save us, can the content? Nope. What makes hugely ambitious books like these interesting is the wordplay, the associations, the author's success in approximating how the human mind actually jumps from topic to topic. All of these areas are lacking.

Unless it totally went over my head, there just isn't a lot of wordplay here. The extent of the book's clever turn of phrases exists in the recurring realization that "hey, this word kind of sounds like this other word, so that's how we'll change the subject." Another fabricated example: "the fact that I keep scratching my arm for no reason, the fact that it's a bad habit, habit, rabbit, the fact that I don't really like rabbits." Some level of this is inherent to the form, but when that is the extent of the clever transition between subjects, it comes off as lazy and, worse yet, uninteresting.

Also - does anybody actually think like this? I certainly can't identify with our narrator's train of thought. Often, when her mind drifts to a particular dessert (which it does, frequently), she'll get stuck on desserts and simply recall every single dessert she can possibly think of. She does this often. When she hears about some occurrence in a national park somewhere, she'll respond by listing every national park she can possibly remember in succession.

I'm no stranger to dense books with this kind of darting focus, but these endless lists don't serve the book in any meaningful way and are an absolute slog to get through. It's telling that the reviewer from Kirkus claimed that Ducks, Newburyport could have made its point "in a quarter of the space."

Think about that - we aren't proposing shaving off a quarter, but shaving off three. This thousand-page book could have made its point all the same in less than three hundred pages. I don't disagree. At the very least, I felt that no less than half of this book was wasted. It feels like a high school senior stretching her ideas as far as she possibly can to meet a page requirement.

And it's all just so, so boring. How many times does the narrator remember an old movie and recite the plot at a high level, and then move on to speculate about the personalities of the actors? How many times does the narrator remember a dream she had recently and describe it blow-by-blow, without any discernible service to the work as a whole? The answer to each of these questions is "at least fifteen." Said another way - at least fourteen times too many. And at no point did I feel like any of these lengthy diversions served the story, showcased strong writing ability, or kept my attention.

SPOILERS HERE - DO NOT READ THIS PARAGRAPH
I'm also disappointed at the hamfisted nature of the political commentary on display here. Our protagonist is a narrow-minded left-leaning citizen, highly critical of Donald Trump and the Republican party as a whole, especially on matters of gun control. This pops up at least 30 times in the book's monologue, and it's never really reasoned through. Just "Trump sucks, everybody just shoots everybody, guns are everywhere, the NRA is killing everyone." She can be so complex on other issues, but her politics boil down to name-calling and constant eye-rolling. It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't ever-present in the book. Perhaps the worst aspect of this shallow political discussion is the book's dramatic ending - the single character in the book who harbors conservative political views abruptly morphs into an active shooter and all-around deranged psychopath, because of course he (yes, HE) does. Suffice to say, this book isn't going to make any strides towards restoring the dialogue between opposing viewpoints that is now so lost and so needed in American political discourse.

So what's good? At the end of the day, I appreciate the ambition behind the book's project, even if I consider it a failure. Some of the insights into motherhood, domestic life in today's America, and various statements on the human condition are provocative and warrant further exploration. But these high points are far too rare and short-lived in a book this size. Much more time is spent speculating on what Harrison Ford and Meryl Streep are like in real life and just yelling at the clouds.

Definitely wasn't for me. Definitely not recommended.

17. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
published: 2019
format: 1040-page paperback
acquired: January
read: Mar 1 – Apr 8
time reading: 41 hr 47 min, 2.5 min/page
rating: 4
locations: Newcomerstown, Ohio
about the author An American-born British novelist based in Edinburgh, Scotland, born 18 October 1956 in Evanston, IL

This is the thousand page stream-of-conscious sentence that came out last year, making the Booker long list and getting a lot of praise, although not universally. When I decided to pursue the Booker longlist, it immediately became the most intimidating book on my shorter TBR, and, as it wasn't available in audio*, would have to wait till I had time to actually read it all. No sneaking this one in during my commute. Somehow comments in my first thread led to a (masochistic?) group read here in Club Read.

So, what is this thing? That is not an easy question to answer. First, I think the narrative is unlike what we typically associate with stream of conscious. There is no real narrative break, it's one Ohio mother-of-four, home-baker-for-income's linear thought trend over the course of a short period. The breaks are her mind association transitions. What comes out is pouring of information and anxiety that readers need to figure out to...not how to understand, that isn't hard...but how to manage. Also, while there are no periods in our unnamed narrator's mind, there in are breaks, with elegant prose, covering a separate story, unknown to our narrator, of mountain and her cubs managing limited wilderness in western Pennsylvania and Ohio. (Yes, there are mountain lions there - a few sightings every so often. Everything in the book is factual except the narrator's and mountain lion's stories.)

The lioness makes a nice counterpoint, as we see her clear thoughts, practical concerns while in constant danger or in a fragile exposed peace. Our anxiety-ridden narrator, however, doesn't exactly tell us what is going on. That's a little hard to explain without reading it, but we only find out the books plot as it fits in what is actually a kind of secondary thought stream of conscious. That is we aren't really getting her main thoughts, we seem to be some other layer, a place where, after spending 1000 pages, I still haven't quite identified yet - maybe something just on the conscious side of our conscious/unconscious thought boundary...but with some kind of intentional commentary in there.

So how was it? It was both moving and horrifying, it was also exhausting, deeply memorable, and admirable. The amount of anxiety and the negative info-dives make for interesting and tough reading, her troubles compounded into regional, national, global, historical, human, political and natural bad news, heaped on top of more intense bad news, sprinkled heavily with the most gut-wrenching headlines that skitter through, appearing and the immediately disappearing in the fog of words. When I say above readers must manage this book, they must manage the relentlessness of all this disheartening information, along with numerous fascinating factoids and stories too. A little Wikipedia potpourri. But there is a real human story in here too - our narrator, her entire set of worries complete exposed here, is also dealing with her four children and husband and health problems and her family. Most moving is the her memories of her now deceased mother, and her mother's health crisis that happened while out narrator was just ready to leave the nest. These human relationships and their complications make a positive counter-force, the aspect that has more expansive feelings, and that makes this book beautiful... Well, I should add, there are few striking prose bits snuggled in here too.

As a reader my relationship with the book evolved over the six weeks I read it and the few days I've now been thinking about it. In the beginning I was really intrigued and then there was rhythm I could just pick up, skipping across words to make connections, then it starts to get a little harder to read, and I was carried a bit by the drive to finish (thank you group read), then it becomes apparent I can't think about the book while I'm reading. There's too much information to process on the page, too much anxiety to loosen up and feel it, and I'm just going to have to wait, then I started to a slow down, had a moment or few of exhaustion, but some late narrative drive carried me home. That overwhelming sense of too-much-information-can't-think was for the hardest part of the book. Because in my own mind, in my own sort of parallel consciousness, I'm asking myself, it this worth it, should I be reading this, what am I reading this for...and I can't address those questions. But now I can.

Is it worth it? For me, yes, I'm grateful to have read it. Should I have spent 6 weeks (as the world was closing due to a pandemic rife why anxious unkowns)? I think so, I mean there is no other way. What was I reading this for? Just to get the end, I guess, to get the full experience of the book. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with all this now. But it will hang around, snugly ensconced in my reading psyche, distinct from everything else I've read. This is a curious experiment that I'm glad I took part of.

*it is now available on audio.

2020
https://www.librarything.com/topic/318836#7124579