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Ducks, Newburyport is the most recent novel from Lucy Ellman, and one of the strangest literary experiences I’ve had in recent years. The novel is 1,020 pages of a single sentence inner monologue, punctuated with commas and the introductory phrase, “the fact that”. The narrator is an Ohio housewife, a mother of four children who bakes desserts and sells them to local restaurants as a supplemental income for her family. Her inner dialogue ranges from personal to global concerns, from full phrases to free word association. The narrator worries about the disdain she faces from her teen daughter, the lack of alimony payments coming from her ex husband, her inability to find a fulfilling career, and how she and her husband will be able to pay the bills. She is insecure about her shyness, which she sees as a roadblock to her personal success, and she laments how the loss of her mother at a young age closed her off from forming meaningful connections with other people.
But her concerns are not only personal, she worries about Trump, the opioid epidemic, police brutality, gun violence, and social media’s effect on the teen psyche. In rural Ohio, our narrator is in the belly of Trump’s America, and she fears the local “Open Carry guys”, who flaunt their weapons in public places. She worries about a world in flux, and laments the various institutions that shackle her and her peers. The narrator is constantly questioning her abilities as a mother, as a wife, and as a baker, and has trouble imagining herself outside of the context of her role as a provider.
The irony of the repetitive phrase “the fact that” is that many of the phrases that follows aren’t facts, they’re opinions. (I.e. “The fact that there’s a lot you just have to blank out if you want to get through life,”). The repetitive phrase begins to feel like a comment on the modern preoccupation with facts and how they can be manipulated, and the blurring of lines between truth and falsehood. The narrator reflects on this, thinking to herself, “the fact that there’s maybe too much emphasis on facts these days, or maybe there are just too many facts.”
In terms of format, the novel works on a variety of levels. It methodically reveals information about the narrator’s life, gradually layering on significance to details that initially appear to be insignificant. The narrator’s personal concerns are fatefully intwined with larger sociopolitical concerns, which feel both urgent as a result of the novel’s format. The format also lends a meta-dimension to the novel, as it creates an interesting dialogue around the limits of narrative prose. This novel is not for the faint of heart, and can feel tedious in its weaker sections, but has some really interesting things on its mind, even if they’re not packaged in the most accessible format.