Lucy Ellmann

Too long and worth it. The immersion into the narrator's consciousness was quite convincing to me and ruined me for a bit to shallower attempts at describing what a character is thinking in more conventional novels. Also, many reviews fail to note how funny it is. So I will: it is quite funny.

This morning I finished this 1000 page book. I'm so grateful to the Club Read group read that prompted me to read this. I've read many long books, but most are classics, and it was interesting to read a very long modern book with current events at it's heart.

The narrator is a middle-aged woman living in the middle of Ohio. She has 4 kids (ages 2-15) and bakes pies for a living. She is on her second marriage and deeply in love with her husband, Leo. She has had cancer and her mother died show more from cancer - this "broke her". She repeatedly thinks "the fact that when Mommy died it broke me, I'm broken". She has a typically troubled mother/daughter relationship with her teenage daughter, Stacey.

All of the things you learn about her life come from her interior monologue which runs beneath her daily activity. Only certain real life events make it into this monologue. Instead most of it is stretches of childhood memory, thinking about movies or other cultural references, and chains of related words. She also thinks about current events - mainly pollution, gun violence, and politics (not a Trump fan!). I found it easy to identify with her thoughts and many made me laugh. We had similar upbringings in the midwest - similar foods, movies, and cultural experiences to reminisce about.

Interposed with her rambling thoughts, there is the story of an American mountain lioness. I was struck by the contrast between the human mother and the lioness mother. The first is constantly worrying with mental chatter but is physically comfortable and the other is experiencing the dangers of nature but has a relatively calm interior life. However, as the book goes on these two experiences converge as the lioness has harmful human interaction and the woman's physical life is endangered.

There were several things that bothered me about this book. I never could figure out the timeline and there were times that I was very annoyed by the narrator's mental chatter. However, I loved the inventiveness of the format and I really thought the intersection of the lioness and the mother narrator was unique and moving.

Despite the length and "newness" of this book, I didn't think it was all that challenging to read or understand. And I didn't think it needed to be shorter - I thought the length was right for the topic and form. Overall, I would recommend it. I love that a book so long and different found a publisher! show less

Ducks.... where do I start. I feel like I've just completed a marathon, and true to the analogy am feeling some sort of giddy elation at having crossed the finish line. Reading doesn't feel like enough of a word to describe this novel - perhaps 'reading experience' captures it better.

This isn't a relaxing book to read. Oddly, it's not the lack of full stops that creates any issue - it's surprising how quickly you get into the reading groove and forget about that, and also stop seeing the show more plethora of 'the fact that' phrases on every page. What demands your attention is rather the sheer volume of information constantly thrown at you - lists of words, anxieties on US societal issues, family worries - and the interchangeability of these topics, often changing continually between commas. There is also no obvious timeline, and from one comma to the next it can skip hours or days (we're never quite sure).

The narration is the interior monologue of a mother of four who is plagued by worries, anxieties and loss. It's different to stream of consciousness in that it perhaps more accurately conveys the erratic nature of our thought process. We don't think in nice concise sentences - our mind flits all over the place, and this is what Ellmann tries to convey in the narrative voice.

This novel is also something of a political stance, or perhaps rather an anti-politics stance. Our Ohio mother rails against many aspects of modern day American society - Trump, deliberate acts of environmental sabotage (dumping of chemicals into rivers and drinking water, nuclear material knowingly left to leak, etc), gun crime and the NRA. So much of the information imparted was horrendous (yet stood up to Google fact checking). In that sense it is perhaps the most brutally honest American novel I've read, although I'm still chewing that over in my mind and trying to figure out if it's honesty or over-sensationalism.

Interwoven in the story is the tale of a mountain lioness and her quest to find her missing cubs, which was not as random as it sounds. It weaves very nicely into the mother's own interior monologue, and at a reading level offers much appreciated respite as it breaks up the narrative.

Back to my marathon analogy, this is a long book that requires close reading, and somewhere in the middle i hit 'the wall' and found it difficult to keep picking up my feet (or rather picking up the book). However, I'm glad I prevailed, and even returned to really enjoying the book in the last few hundred pages. It's a tour de force, a book of admirable achievement when you start to appreciate that it's not just a load of random phrases but actually an immense piece of work that's meticulously sewn together.

4 stars - a vast book in all senses, but one that deserved a few weeks of my time. show less

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 show more 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 show less