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Summary
Summary
WINNER OF THE 2019 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE * SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE * A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2019 * A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 * A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2019
"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."--Parul Sehgal, New York Times
Baking a multitude of tartes tatins 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.
Author Notes
Lucy Ellmann's 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, Mimi. Her short stories have appeared in magazines, newspapers and anthologies, and she has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement, Telegraph, New Statesman and Society, Spectator, Herald, Scottish Review of Books, Time Out (London), Art Monthly, Thirsty Books, Bookforum, Aeon, The Evergreen, and The Baffler. A screenplay, The Spy Who Caught a Cold, was filmed and broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK. She edits fiction for the Fiction Atelier (fictionatelier.wordpress.com), and abhors standard ways of teaching Creative Writing, which she considers mostly criminal. Though American by birth, she lives in Scotland.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This shaggy stream-of-consciousness monologue from Ellmann (Sweet Desserts) confronts the currents of contemporary America. On the surface it's a story of domestic life, as the unnamed female narrator puts it: "my life's all shopping, chopping, slicing, splicing, spilling." Her husband, Leo, is a civil engineer; they have "four greedy, grouchy, unmanageable kids"; she bakes and sells pies; and nothing more eventful happens than when she gets a flat tire while making a pie delivery. Yet plot is secondary to this book's true subject: the narrator's consciousness. Written in rambling hundred-page sentences, whose clauses each begin with "the fact that...," readers are privy to intimate facts ("the fact that I don't think I really started to live until Leo loved me"), mundane facts ("the fact that 'fridge' has a D in it, but 'refrigerator' doesn't"), facts thought of in the shower ("the fact that every murderer must have a barber"), and flights of associative thinking ("Jake's baby potty, Howard Hughes's milk bottles of pee, opioid crisis, red tide"). Interspersed throughout is the story of a lion mother, separated from her cubs and ceaselessly searching for them. 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. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Ellmann tells a tale of two mothers. One is a magnificent mountain lion whose brief, increasingly dramatic appearances are rendered in lyrical sentences and paragraphs that surface intermittently like stepping-stones within a deluge of consciousness conveying the tumbling thoughts of a forty-something human mother of four in Ohio. Her Niagara of memories, worries, observations, and self-criticisms surge across the novel's many pages in one audaciously long sentence, achieving an incantatory cadence based on the refrain the fact that ( the fact that I seem to fall in love during family crises, first Chuck, then Leo, the fact that Frank doesn't count, the fact that I tried to love him ). Ellmann's smart, hilarious, high-strung narrator a former history teacher, a caterer specializing in pies, and a cancer survivor ruminates over food, family, extinction, the Native American genocide, nuclear waste, movies, Laura Ingalls Wilder, school shootings, racism, Trump, plastic-filled oceans, and polluted rivers. She adores her engineer husband and mourns for her mother, to whom the title obliquely refers. As the mountain lion's natural idyll is destroyed, forcing her on a desperate odyssey, her human counterpoint and her children also come under siege. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 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.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2010 Booklist
Guardian Review
The Booker longlisted author on the book that made her think differently about sex - and the one that made her faint with revulsion and awe The book I am currently reading I like to have more than one book on the go but got on a train to the continent this summer, travelling so light I forgot to bring any book at all! A reissued 1950s anthology was my desperate solution at a bookstore in the Gare Montparnasse. Short stories sure have changed. These seem pretty fusty, and prone to annoying plot twists right at the end. The only story I've really liked so far is Frank O'Connor's "The Man of the House", about a boy who drinks his sick mother's medicine after walking all the way to Cork to collect it for her. Luckily, I knew Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote was awaiting me at my destination. Now, that's a fun book. The book that changed my life Valerie Solanas's S C U M Manifesto . It's not well written and it's highly repetitive but it did open up for me a whole new subversive 60s world. I still find it amusing, outrageous and gutsy. The book I wish I'd written SCUM Manifesto . And Herman Melville's Moby-Dick . The book that influenced my writing Every book I ever read - except, I hope, Hot Rod by Henry Gregor Felsen and White Fang by Jack London. The book that's overrated? All crime fiction, I don't care who it's by The book I think is most overrated/underrated Overrated: all crime fiction, I don't care who it's by. Underrated: Philip Roth's memoir Patrimony . It's not talked about enough. The book I give as a gift Maurice Sendak 's Nutshell Library . As a child I used to hide under the covers with these tiny books. They seemed all the library I needed. One features a threatening lion; another's just about chicken soup with rice in it. Confession: I wooed my husband with Thomas Bernhard's Concrete . Woodcutters might have been the better choice (it's his best, I think), but Concrete did the trick. The book that changed my mind The Story of V by Catherine Blackledge. It turns out the female orgasm is the biggest news on the planet. News that stays news. The last book that made me cry Dorothy Whipple's egregious The Priory . It's easy to make readers weep over a dying baby, and that's why she did it. The last book that made me laugh Alex Pheby's Lucia . His discourse on the tapeworm had me fainting with revulsion and awe. (But oh God, I read that a year ago! Have I not laughed since?) The book I couldn't finish If I start, I finish. Unless I lose it. I lost Gone With the Wind when I was 13, which is just as well. The book I'm most ashamed not to have read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. It seems so relevant to our times! What with the last remnants of civilisation crumbling all around us. I've kept these volumes handy for years but somehow I never seem to get around to reading them. My earliest reading memory Not good. I was way behind my class and my father had to give me emergency reading lessons at home: me sullen, him impatient. I assume we read Dick and Jane. I later graduated to The Cat in the Hat , Babar, and Madeline . My comfort reading "Comfort read" is a demeaning term, kind of like "cuppa" or "undies" or "jacket potato". I'm comforted by good writing: Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Vladimir Nabokov, Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Molly Keane and J California Cooper.
Kirkus Review
Postmodern romp by expat novelist Ellmann (Tom the Obscure, 2014, etc.).The lioness whose tale opens and punctuates Ellmann's Ulysses-sized saga is resolutely fierce in protecting her litter of cubs, who, like her, are "too brave to despair." Not so the humans who populate Ellmann's pages, residents of a Trump-era Ohio in which there is no ground solid enough to walk on, metaphorically speaking. The narrator, a materfamilias whose voice burbles in a flooded stream of consciousness, seeks solidity: Her operative phrase, found time and again on each period-scant page, is "the fact that": "the fact that we're in for a wineless old age, oi veh, OJ, the fact that Leo has to go to Philly tomorrow and I'm not so good on my own." That may be, but much as Leo, her partner amid life's uncertainties, cares for her, she's forced to contend with difficult, distant children and everyday travails ("the fact that Trump wants to take cover away from 630,000 Ohioans who took up Obamacare last year, and if he gets away with it, some of those poor souls are possibly going to die, the fact that I'm glad we're not on Obamacare"). All this memory and reflection and agonizing comes in an onrushing flow of language that slips oftendeliberately, it seems, but too obviouslyinto games of throwaway word association: "Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dustin Hoffman, The Tales of Hoffman." One wonders why Abbie Hoffman is missing from the picture, but it's no surprise that a worried note that the Amazon is polluted should be immediately followed by a reference to Jeff Bezos. There are lovely bits of poetry and, well, fact scattered throughout these pages ("the fact that recipes change over time through forgetting stuff," "the fact that you don't want to become a bitter old woman, it's plenty bad enough just being old"), 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This novel from the award-winning Ellmann (Sweet Desserts) is a long, free-association, run-on sentence coming from the overactive brain of a mother of four, happily married to an engineering professor. A former college teacher herself, now a professional baker in Newcomerstown, OH, she is also a survivor of open-heart surgery and cancer. Her many obsessions include but are hardly limited to her children, especially her hostile teenage daughter; her mother (from Newburyport), who died young; pies and cinnamon rolls; injustices large and small; old movies; Donald Trump; Marie Kondo; gun violence; industrial pollution; and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Random words such as hydrangea, Djibouti, Giant Viper's Bugloss, and ducks pop up like tics in her stream of consciousness. The story that emerges from these riffs and ruminations is interrupted only by a tale about a mountain lion, which seems to have nothing to do with the main event until the two ingeniously merge. VERDICT Is it worth the considerable time and effort required to get through 728 densely packed pages to journey into the mind of this funny and insanely loveable worrywart? Yes! It's a jaw-dropping miracle.--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Excerpts
Excerpts
When you are all sinew, struggle and solitude, your young - being soft, plump, vulnerable - may remind you of prey. The damp furry closeness in the crowded den sometimes gave her an over-warm sensation akin to nausea, or boredom. Snaking her long limbs as far as space permitted, she longed to be out on her winding path, ranging wide in search of deer. In her dreams she slaughtered whole herds. She sought that first firm clasp on a stag's neck, the swift parting of its hide, her mouth filling at last with what was hot and wet and necessary. For all of life is really recoil and leap, leap and recoil. Alertness was her new mode, but the cubs' easy slumber was contagious. To be woken, biffed in the face by the paw of a sleeping kitten. She was always briefly astounded, on waking, by their continued presence. They troubled her, they were so needy: if she died, they would die too, and soon. And she would forget them. But for now, she belonged to them. They were not so much a conscious concern as the whole purpose of her being - lives engendered by her body, created inside her and released through pain and panting upon the world. She had borne them, and now she fed them with her milk. They were part of her still. For the first week they were sprawling, crawling mush to her, demanding gentleness, forbearance, cleanups. The air shook with the vibrations of her purr. She learnt to maneuver her way round their wriggling forms with all kinds of fancy new steps. The more they squirmed, the more adroitly she had to dodge them. She never left them for more than half an hour. The mere thought of the kittens bleating and scrabbling around back in the den diminished her resolve, made her less surefooted, ruined her joy in the kill. She went hungry, even sank to eating snowshoe hares that ventured near the den. And, once, a disappointing goosander, all feather, feet, beak and bone. Her infant cubs, drifting back to sleep midway across each other's backs, never knew how long she was gone, or how far from them she roamed. She might still be inside the den somewhere, just an inch out of reach. In hope, they dragged themselves over to the wall like legless seal pups, their short stubby tails nothing like the muscly ropes they would later become. Little more than mush, they toured the den in slow circles, chirping enticingly, feeling out for any sign of her, just the tip of her giant paw or long whiskers. Longing for her warmth, her tongue, her strong sleek rump, they sought her with determination, for they too were hunters, and brave. Too brave to despair. * The fact that the raccoons are now banging an empty yoghurt carton around on the driveway, the fact that in the early morning stillness it sounds like gunshots, the fact that, even in fog, with ice on the road and snow banks blocking their vision, people are already zooming around our corner, the site of many a minor accident, the fact that a guy in a pickup once accidentally skidded into our garage, and next time it could be our house, or a child, Wake Up Picture Day, dicamba, Kleenex, the fact that a pickup truck killed Dilly, the fact that she'd successfully dodged cars for three whole years, the fact that she knew all about cars, but during that time the traffic grew, the fact that it's crazee now, the fact that after Dilly got killed, the kids painted a big warning sign with a big black cat on it and stuck it right by the fence, but nobody notices it, the fact that they're all going too fast to see it, ♬ When the cat died we had catnip tea ♬, the fact that failure to yield causes one in five accidents in Ohio, the fact that car crashes are up twenty percent since 2009, haw tree, buckeye, black walnut, hickory, butternut, the fact that Stacy's old enough to handle the road but the other kids aren't, the fact that a little boy was killed in his bed just the other day by a skidding car crashing into his house, Ben asleep, the fact that there are two cardinals right now in the lilac tree, brown sugar, the fact that eleven percent of Americans carry on driving when the fuel-tank-empty light comes on, the fact that, boy, you'd think it'd be more like eighty percent, Ronny, chicken feed, the fact that there are macrophages, the fact that I dreamt I flew all the way to India to get a teaspoon of cinnamon but when I got home I realized I needed flaked almonds too, security, holding pattern, go figure, not in my backyard, the fact that we have to do our taxes and try to remember every little bit of income and expenditure, the fact that there was more of the latter than the former, Family Dollar, Baker's IGA, password, username, "Your card is now active and ready to use," the fact that not only do we have to calculate our income and expenditure but we gotta figure out how to get more money, and keep on getting money till we're dead, Medicare For All, the fact that by the time Leo's old enough to get Social Security it probably won't even cover the price of a ham sandwich, much less a bottle of wine, the fact that we're in for a wineless old age, oi veh, OJ, the fact that Leo has to go to Philly tomorrow and I'm not so good on my own, the fact that Ben knows so much for such a little kid, maybe too much, the fact that he says drugs work on a molecular level that can be assessed using logarithms and Schild Curves, but I just pop 'em and leave the rest to chance, breakfast, alarm clock, laundry, Spinbrush, the fact that we have to have a cocktail party and I don't know what to wear, the fact that the only fun part is deciding on the canapés, cocktails, cock-a-doodle-do, cock, oh my word, the fact that words just pop into my head like that, dear me, the fact that I've got to get the dough going for the cinnamon rolls, the fact that at least we're not having any more dinner parties, the fact that I put my foot down there, ♬ Your feet's too big ♬, feat of strength, footloose and fancy-free, the fact that our parties are always a big flop anyway because the kids come down in the middle in their onesies and kill all conversation with cuteness, the fact that they look like polar bear cubs and they know it, the fact that sometimes they end up serving the drinks too, the fact that I don't know what Prof Pranump would make of that, especially since she's teetotal, tea, Triscuits, Ritz crackers, Saltines, Fritos, Doritos, Frito-Lay, Planters peanuts, Blue Diamond smoked almonds, Prohibition, Some Like It Hot, the fact that soon polar bears and walruses will have nowhere to go, because the polar ice is melting, cheese and pineapple on sticks, cheddar cheese logs, school bus, ground cardamom, dried cherries, zest, the fact that walruses can swim for four hundred miles, sure, but not forever, for Pete's sake, the fact that animals don't pride themselves on irrationality the way we do, the fact that, according to Ben, half the mammals on the planet will disappear by 2050, two hundred species a day or something like that, the fact that Ben says everybody on earth will soon be starving or suffocating or dying of SARS or Ebola or H5N1, the fact that H5N1 only has to mutate a few more times and we're all goners, so maybe it was all for nothing, human achievement, but before that happens, we still have to do our taxes, and Leo needs to fix the garage door, the fact that it keeps sticking, missing button, bathroom grouting, the fact that Stacy would probably approve of a global pandemic, as long as it included us, her nearest and dearest, the fact that I don't know why we released our poor little terrapins into the pond at Northwestern, the fact that we thought they'd be happy there, free, the fact that nobody ever told us they were tropical terrapins, the fact that we actually thought they'd like swimming free, in that freezing cold pond, the fact that I saw a dead dog with rabies there once, near the pond, so theoretically our turtles could have gotten rabies first, before they froze to death, the fact that we weren't much good as pet owners, I guess, the bumblebee at Bread Loaf, the fact that what we liked best was going to the Big Building, where Daddy worked, because sometimes you got a free pencil, the fact that we loved climbing on the big painted rock outside, the fact that there was this great big boulder right in front of the building, the fact that I don't know if somebody dragged the thing there or it was just there when they built the university and they couldn't get rid of it, the fact that the paint was interestingly chipped and you could see how many layers it had, blue, red, white, yellow, green, Chris Rock, the fact that I think they painted it a new color every year or so, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the fact that Mozart had a starling, the fact that female starlings sing too, not just male starlings, murmurations, Ohio Blue Tip matches, phone call, a big ask, the fact that I don't know where my cellphone is, the fact that I never know where it is, the fact that cellphones are always trying to escape their owners, the fact that there are earthquakes and tornadoes and tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, the fact that where did I see that red velvet cushion with gold trim, Gillian's tall bird with sequins, felt and sequins, Christmastime, alone with Mommy in their bedroom at twilight, twi-night double header, sidewinder, sidecar, sidelines, left field, the fact that Stacy never mentions Frank, well, not to me anyway, Rex the Walkie-Talkie Robot Man, the fact that I don't think she misses him at all, Reader's Digest, Hardee's on 2nd Street, Arby's, Hy-Vee, Mommy and Daddy's bedroom in the late afternoon, the fact that I always liked sequins on felt, the fact that I don't think Stacy minds having a stepdad at all, the fact that these days most kids have half brothers and sisters, so they must be pretty used to it, the fact that all in all we're really just a normal Joy, Pledge, Crest, Tide, Dove, Woolite, Palmolive, Clorox, Rolaids, Pepto-Bismol, Alka-Seltzer, Desitin, Advil, Aleve, Tylenol, Anacin, Bayer, Excedrin, Vitamin C, Kleenex, Kotex, Tampax, Altoid, Barbazol, Almay, Revlon, Cetaphil, Right Guard, Old Spice, Gillette, Q-Tip, Johnson & Johnson, Vaseline, Listerine, Head 'n' Shoulders, Tylenol, Bayer, Anacin, Safe Owl, Eagle Brand, Jolly Green Giant, Land O' Lakes, Lucerne, Sealtest, Clover, Blue Bonnet, Half 'n' Half, Snyder, VanCamp, Wish-Bone, French's, Skyline, Empress, Gerber, Nabisco, Heinz, Kraft, Quaker Oats, Sunkist, Purina, Vlasic, Oreos, Shredded Wheat, Arm & Hammer, Jell-O, Pez, Sara Lee, Chock Full o' Nuts, Libby, Pepperidge Farm, Fleischmann's, Morton, General Mills, King Arthur, Bell's, Reese's Pieces kind of household like everybody else, "Houston, we got a problem" . . . Excerpted from Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
