Ducks, Newburyport

Written by Lucy Ellmann

Narrated by Stephanie Ellyne

Baking a multitude of tartes tatin for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband,
cats and chickens. Also, America’s ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open
Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda.
But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son’s toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken
treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When
are you allowed to start swearing?

With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you
to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America’s barbarity, and a lament
for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy—and a revolution in the novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781980090359

Lucy Ellmann

Lucy Ellmann is the author of Ducks, Newburyport, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, Goldsmiths Prize and Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. She was born in Illinois and dragged to England as a teenager. Her first novel, Sweet Desserts, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. It was followed by Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, Man or Mango? A Lament, Dot in the Universe, Doctors & Nurses and Mimi. She now lives in Edinburgh.

Reviews for Ducks, Newburyport

[ghost_boy-691444 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Well this book took me forever to finish, but ended up becoming a favorite. There wasn't much a plot since it's one long stream of conciseness in a postmodern style. It's not an easy book and some people might get scared if they look at how it's written. For me, it was a good example what it's like inside the mind of someone with anxiety. The book covers a lot of topics. It wasn't publish that long ago, so it's still relevant. This was a fun ride!

[bruyere_c · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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...

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[narshkite · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

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.

[chrisblocker · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[alisony-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 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.

[japaul22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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 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!