For most of its 1,000 pages, Lucy Ellmann’s brilliantly ambitious seventh novel follows the unspooling consciousness of an Ohio housewife circa 2017, and does so almost entirely in one long, lyrical, constantly surprising sentence ... her voice has a distinct cadence ... since she is a curious, politically conscious, slightly frenetic person, we step into and out of subjects from Donald Trump to purple martins, global warming to Laura Ingalls Wilder, animal cruelty, school shootings, SpaghettiOs, industrial pollution, hydrangeas, even the word 'hydrangea' ... At times there’s such fury to these ruminations that the book seems to shift into direct cultural critique; at other times it all seems simply part of the story. The author’s hand never points us either way ... Whatever strangeness it presents has to do with the fact that, notwithstanding Ellmann’s great skills in narrative and character development, the overall effect is less plot-driven drama than vast existential collage. This is a novel, but it is also, fundamentally, a very long and meaningful list ... as accumulative, as pointed, as death-addled, as joyous, as storied, as multitudinous and as large as life.
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann is brilliant—and addictive ... The listings, beginning with 'the fact that' and separated by commas, aren’t just lumped together. There’s an art to them, a rhythm, that sort of takes you ... The reason this book resonates is that we all seem to be thinking in spirals, fueled by nonstop news, social media, and multiple screens. While the narrative seemingly jumps from one topic to another in a random stream of consciousness, reading it is an act of focus because it’s so mesmerizing ... The book could easily dissolve, considering its length, but Ellmann fortifies it with mini-surprises tucked in throughout the narrative. (Yes, this book has a plot and sticking with it offers a big payoff ending.) ... It's the lovely bits of this beautiful life despite all the ugliness that makes this book really resonate. It's not all a horror show, especially when the character talks about the tender relationship that she has with her family and her husband, Leo.
Much of the pleasure of this book is the pleasure of learning a puzzle’s rules ... Even more effective is the way the text circles particular fragments, layering them with meaning as their salience to the story becomes clear ... What emerges is almost a joking definition of consciousness: the facts of life exist, in a jumble, and this book is content to perform awareness of them ... Instead of evoking the felt experience of inner life, Ellmann seems to be creating a stylized braid of conscious and unconscious thought—an artifice that’s aware of its own construction ... there is restraint, and even intimacy, to the way that the book theorizes about 'the moment.' Ellmann captures the pathos of the everyday, how one might use pie crusts and film synopses to dam in pain ... Maximalism drives home Ellmann’s social critique...But the reader can wonder about the costs of this style, which explores what it would mean to record everything, to leave no stray thought or dream untagged. One effect of Ellmann’s portrait is that we’re privy to seemingly every piece of information; there’s no sense of selection, no room for the reader to project ... Ellmann’s commitment to compilation and description suggests a resistance to hierarchies. It also flickers with tenderness. The time and care that she lavishes on her narrator seem like their own form of political speculation—that every individual is owed an unending devotion, and that such devotion, applied universally, might change the fate of the world.
...seems designed to thwart the timid or lazy reader but shouldn’t. Timid, lazy readers to the front! Ellmann’s unnamed narrator, a mother of four living in Ohio, has a cutting power of observation and a depressive charm ... This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now: toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry ... feels dense at first, a bit like drowning, without a period or paragraph break in sight. But a rhythm asserts itself and a structure, musical and associative ... Never mind the mountain lioness subplot, the novel’s most startling feature is the marriage at its center: the narrator’s life with her husband, their steadiness and mutual enchantment, their kindness to each other. In literature, sometimes nothing seems so extraordinary as ordinary happiness ... The capaciousness of the book allows Ellmann to stretch and tell the story of one family on a canvas that stretches back to the bloody days of Western expansion, but its real value feels deeper — it demands the very attentiveness, the care, that it enshrines.
...with Ducks, Newburyport, Ellmann has clearly weighed up the opinions of her critics and the pros and cons of her trademark style, considered her options, and thought: 'Damn the lot of you, I’m going to continue to write exactly the kind of novel I want to write, thank you very much.' In this case it turns out to be around 1,000 pages of an Ohio mother of four and homemaker worrying, mostly in one long sentence untroubled by full stops ... In her latest novel Ellmann doesn’t just carry on as before: she doubles down, doubles up and absolutely goes for broke ... In many ways, the book reads like a culmination. This is partly because of its extraordinary length and bold rhetorical devices, but also because it brings together elements from all Ellmann’s previous books: her great love of lists; the endless references to popular culture; the roarings and forebodings and glorious meanderings. I could tell you the significance of the ducks of the title, but that would cheat you of one of the great pleasures of the novel, which is just sticking with it and allowing the author to determine the pace and rhythm at which you read. 'This book will either be a success or a failure,' remarks one character. 'Nobody wants to hear that,' responds the narrator. Fair enough. Success? Failure? Triumph.
... requires patience and good cheer; otherwise you may not find your way through the continual and often exasperating redundancies that occur on every one of this book’s pages ... The novel bombards its reader with info-bites — funny, sad, thoughtful, angry, confused, apocalyptic — with the ceaseless regularity of a combustion engine. Sometimes the repetition can drive a weak mind (like mine) a bit mad; but every time I was about to put the book down and walk away, I would be struck again by the protagonist’s bright, unpretentious, ironic voice ... The narrative voice that drives this inexhaustible and exhausting accumulation of 'facts' is surprisingly interesting, engaging and inventive ... Ellmann’s fictional world reminds us, over and over, that yeah, we get it. We live here, too, lady. We feel engulfed, every day when we wake up and every night when we go to bed. Engulfed, engulfed, engulfed. The world just doesn’t quit, does it? ... My biggest failure as a reader of Ducks (and I’ll have to leave it to posterity to decide if this is my failure or the book’s) was in trying to discern a 'front story' ... maybe we don’t need reminding what a mess we’re drowning in. Or maybe it’s just too late.
Lucy Ellmann’s new novel, Ducks, Newburyport, does not, despite the claims of some reviewers, consist of a single sentence (I counted 880). But it does contain one very long one ... The prose gains momentum recursively, as half rhymes and echoes of memory trigger the next associative stream. The effect is by turns infuriating, hypnotic and addictive ... Ellmann’s first six novels tempered their political seriousness and emotional intensity with a puckish flippancy, like Tristram Shandy rewritten by Stevie Smith ... Many of these elements are present in Ducks, Newburyport, which feels at once more real – because less cartoony – and more sentimental than her earlier books, and, despite its scale (it is longer than all of them combined), smaller in scope. This is partly a result of the claustrophobia involved in spending nearly half a million words inside a single character’s head. But it’s also because the narrator is so much more earnest than those in her previous books ... What’s most unusual about Ducks, Newburyport isn’t its length but the sustained attention it pays to the details of domestic life that usually go unwritten. That its maximalism feels like a provocation is partly because no one has paid this much attention to this kind of mind before. The intimacy it produces depends on recognition – you might well have the same flotsam and jetsam bumbling around your own mind – but the novel’s uncanniness is produced by repetition. As the pages turn and the layers build up, ideas, images, memories seep out, so that when they’re revisited hundreds of pages later you can’t quite recall if you’ve had the same thought before, or if Ellmann supplied it.
Lucy Ellmann has written an effervescent novel, Ducks, Newburyport, that encompasses a contemporary life by underscoring the material language that composes its consciousness ... Ducks, Newburyport is unapologetic in how it molds a consciousness on the page. That consciousness acts as a nexus for the noise of contemporary life, occasionally to an enervating, exhilarating effect ... The only breaks from the continuous sentence are the short sections that follow a female mountain lion ... Filled with conventionally lovely sentences, the prose here shrinks its scope upon entering the mountain lion’s comparatively clear and simple mind ... More often than not, the word associations bubble up and burst as slight, inconsequential digressions ... Quips like this litter Ducks, Newburyport like the gleaming detritus of a treasure-filled junkyard; they are the leftovers from the fact that language is a living, evolving structure ... entrancing.
...a work resplendent in ambition, humour and humanity ... Written in a dizzying stream-of-consciousness style of internal haranguing and methodical multitasking, Ducks is loosely rooted in the quotidian ... There is also a free-floating anxiety, familiar in its insubordination to logic ... 'The fact that' the narrator keeps repeating, because facts are all she seems to be able to keep hold of. Facts, puns and wordplay jostle with simultaneously laugh-out-loud and sombre reflections on anything from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series...to Meryl Streep’s beleaguered character in the romcom It’s Complicated, through Obamacare, Trumpism and the flickering progress of the local capture of a runaway mountain lion ... it is the great female modernist writers of the early 20th century that Ellmann fits with most assuredly. Her detailed observations on time and memory evoke Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, her interior soliloquies Dorothy Richardson’s epic Pilgrimage series; but the lodestar is Virginia Woolf. In Ducks, Newburyport Ellmann has created a wisecracking, melancholy Mrs Dalloway for the internet age.
I wondered how soon readers would give up after reading just an iota of narration like 'Forget-Me-Not, Dogwood, Rose, rose madder, While Titian was mixing rose madder' in a novel thicker than a brick ... The case could be made for considering Ducks less a novel proper than a work of art ... It’s an audacious, radically challenging document ... It’s not only massive, but complicated. It refuses, absolutely refuses, to be shorter than its epic size, and Ellmann is no tour guide holding our hands along the easiest path. Ducks is a technical masterpiece and kind of literary manifesto. And while vexing, it’s always intellectually stimulating ... Ducks, Newburyport can’t help but trigger conversations. For the completion-oriented, it’s a veritable test—aggravating, perplexing, engrossing, and, well, a staggeringly provocative work of genius.
We discern certain events that happen to her, but what we’re given access to in the form of this nameless narrator is a rather extraordinary depiction of a mind that resembles a swirling nebulous of information, and thoughts returning and doubling back on themselves over and over ... philosophic and inventive whilst being writhed with a scathing humor ... The narrator’s mind in Ducks retains all that which causes her pain and sadness—as well as joy—and it’s not always a choice, not always a pleasant narrative that we can tell to and about ourselves, about those choices and about future choices, that allow us to master them ... the time you’ll have with this novel, whether that be a long or short period, is the kind of time you’d spend with a companion in that it becomes secondary to how much more those moments represent.
... close to 1,000 pages, a total made difficult to calculate due to an auxiliary story which nuzzles into the main text every so often. This is written in a more conventional fashion, unlike every other part of the novel which works as a continuous flow of thoughts and associations; an approach that is not in any way gimmicky ... It is, instead, an extraordinary achievement of wit and imagination detailing the life and inner reasoning of a contemporary and conventional American woman who lives in Ohio with her husband and four children ... The manner in which the narrator’s thoughts are conveyed is the principal achievement of this astounding novel ... There is a complete sense of authenticity in the way that words get associated in her mind, a rolling catalogue of great humour and invention (always beginning with 'the fact that', a device that ought to become tiresome, but which never does) ... There’s so much more to this amazing novel. Undoubtedly it’s a long read, but it is never less than rewarding to engage with the observations of this companionable narrator. The fact that the writing has a beautiful cadence and rhythm. The fact that I haven’t even mentioned all the hilarious, salty comments about Trump. The fact that this isn’t just one of the outstanding books of 2019, it’s one of the outstanding books of the century, so far.
Over the last four weeks, for two hours a day, I have read Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport. When I showed the book to a friend, he said it looked like it could take four weeks off my life, too. Well, it almost did ... Sometimes, it reads like an indictment of modern America and some of its more iniquitous foundations, like the massacre of Native Americans and the appropriation of their land. So, it is a stream of consciousness novel, but also a stream of conscience novel ... Who is this woman and why are we in her head for so long? She could be all mothers everywhere and mother earth combined. But whoever she is, she is one of the most intriguing, charming and genuinely funny characters I have come across in recent years. And, somehow, out of all the detritus flowing through her mind, there emerges a whole life, with its own distinctive American voice, full of wit, intelligence and an array of emotions ... Still, even now, in recovery, I can’t say for certain what this novel’s all about. Moreover, I can’t say if it’s a masterpiece or a terrible splurge of fearful polemic and word association. But, to hell with it, I certainly enjoyed the ride.
Contrasting the narrator’s stream of consciousness are occasional short sections that feature a lioness and her cubs. Terse and specific, these more traditional scenes are a relief from the constant mental chatter but not separate from it ... There is enlightenment in the melee, and heartbreak, too, as separations of all kinds—expected and unexpected, willing and unwilling—challenge mothers of all species. Love, parenthood, survival, and loss are the dominant notes, and readers who give themselves over to the dense pages will find themselves moved.
The fact that Ducks, Newburyport is 1,020 pages long, the fact that 95% of the novel is made up of just eight near-endless sentences, without paragraph breaks, some of them spooling over more than 100 pages, the fact that most of the novel is a list of statements, separated by commas, that begin with the phrase 'the fact that', the fact that you soon don’t notice the repetition of 'the fact that' the fact that these statements are also punctuated by the seemingly random emanations of the narrator’s mind...in Ducks, Newburyport, [Ellman] is making a case for a certain type of modernist novel, for difficulty, for pushing the stream-of-consciousness narrative to its limits, the fact that I read her years ago and had forgotten about her acidic, funny novels with their lists and their glowering, the fact that this feels like all of those novels rolled into one, with the story taken out, the fact that you eventually realise the story is there, but you’ve got to work for it ... the fact that I still worry that no book is good enough to be this long, the fact that 98% of those who pick it up will think it unspeakable guff, the fact that the 2% who get it will really get it. Well, that was exhausting, but I wasn’t sure how else to give the sense of quite what a strange and complex experience reading Ellmann’s eighth novel is ... There were a few dark moments while working my way through Ducks, Newburyport, where death seemed positively appealing as I was faced with another page of dense type, another list, another 'the fact that'; but this is a novel that rewards perseverance, is truly unique, and feels like an absence in your life when you finish it.
...a tale of two mothers...rendered in lyrical sentences and paragraphs that surface intermittently like stepping-stones within a deluge of consciousness ... [a] smart, hilarious, high-strung narrator ... Ellmann’s mesmerizing, witty, maximalist (think David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann), and maddening performance is a bravura and caring inquiry into Earth’s glory, human creativity and catastrophic recklessness, and the transcendence of love.
What does a 1,000-page sentence even look like? It springs from thought to thought, separated by commas, with no breaks, no paragraphs, no let-up ... It is not entirely without structure: occasionally its never-ending sentence is interrupted with a story about a lioness and her cubs that ultimately merges with our narrator’s life, and there’s violent drama toward the end. This book is stuck between insanity and genius, arousing conflicting responses in the reader. I toiled through it, yet missed our heroine afterwards, which might show Ellmann’s brilliance in executing her eccentric project, or just be an example of Stockholm syndrome. It brings to mind Samuel Johnson on the Giant’s Causeway: 'Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.' To put it another way, you’d have to be mad to read this book, but you might be glad you did.
... one of those curious books whose universality comes combined with a kind of minute particularisation ... There are also some wonderfully funny quasi-rants on what Matthew Arnold would have called Regrettable Modern Tendencies ... As well as being funny, despairing and sharply observed, it simply goes on too long, digresses too much and compromises its attack by way of inconsequentiality. You could argue that what defines Ellmann’s practised avant-garderie is not so much her weakness for dreadful puns, CAPITAL LETTERS and italicising words for no apparent reason, but her reluctance to discriminate ... Several hundred thousand words later, the reader stumbles forth exhausted with the sense of having gone up several hundred cul-de-sacs, in which passages of great beauty alternate with tedious lists. And so delight in the spectacle of a tiny independent publisher from Norwich taking on the big boys in the Booker is tempered by a suspicion that over much of Ducks, Newburyport hangs a faint air of desultoriness.
... 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.
This jumble of cascading thoughts provides a remarkable portrait of a woman in contemporary America contemplating her own life and society’s storm clouds, such as the Flint water crisis, gun violence, and the Trump presidency. The narrator is a fiercely protective mother trying to raise her children the only way she knows how, in a rapidly changing and hostile environment. Ellmann’s work is challenging but undoubtedly brilliant.
All this memory and reflection and agonizing comes in an onrushing flow of language that slips often—deliberately, it seems, but too obviously—into games of throwaway word association ... There are lovely bits of poetry and, well, fact scattered throughout these pages...but it’s awfully hard work getting at them, and for too little payoff. Literary experimentation that, while surely innovative, could have made its point in a quarter the space.
