PositiveThe Globe and Mail (UK)... wildly ambitious ... Ellmann manages to be both relentless and almost maddeningly obscure. From the outset, she gives you so little to go on that I kept fighting the urge to put it down and check Instagram ... Perhaps in keeping with the kitchen sink setting of her narrator’s ruminations, Ellmann has chosen to address this with a conversational tone, as if the narrator was quite literally talking to us inside her own head...To my mind, a result that, on occasion, fails to convince ... Moreover, Ellmann’s decision to jettison conventional sentence or paragraph structure means that in order to signal a shift from one passing thought to another, she resorts to introducing each new thought bubble with phrase \'the fact that …\' – a convention that, while successful in creating a sort of staccato rhythm, can start to grate ... In a book cooked up to be this big, there is also a lot of stuffing ... The good news is that hunkering down – just as our narrator does, against the horror and tumult of the outside world in the warmth of her own kitchen – and sticking with Ducks, Newburyport soon begins to bear fruit. The realization comes that the book’s almost rhythmic repetition of anxieties and childhood memories interspersed with wry, often quite pointed observations about contemporary life start circling around each other like stitches in a handmade quilt fashioned from old movie plots, ad jingles, dreams, clippings from the newspaper and random bits of American history ... But the best thing about tackling Ellmann’s magnum opus is that in the process of reading it, you are forced into a position of slowing down sufficiently to fully concentrate. Which makes Ducks, Newburyport the literary equivalent of some kind of mindfulness exercise – a public service in these times of mass distraction if there ever was one. While the kitchen-sink alternative to the furiousness out there that Ellmann offers can be compared to Voltaire’s conclusion that the answer lies in cultivating one’s own garden, Ducks, Newburyport goes one step further: putting your head down and plugging away at something challenging, such as this book, yields its own rewards. By page 700, I started feeling regret that I only had a couple hundred more pages left to go.
