Ducks, Newburyport
Lucy Ellman, 2019
Biblioasis
1040 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781771963077
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October, 18 1956
• Where—Evanston, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A.University of Essex; M.A., Courtald Institute of Art
• Awards—Booker Prize, shortlisted
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Lucy Ellmann was born in the U.S., to biographer Richard Ellman and writer Mary (Donahue) Ellman. The family moved to Britain when she was 13, and although she has said she always meant to return to American soil, she never did. She received her B.A. from the University of Essex and her M.A. at the Courtald Institute of Art. She now lives in Scotland.
Ellman's first novel, Sweet Desserts (1989), won the Guardian Fiction Prize. It was followed by Varying Degrees of Hopelessness (1991), Man or Mango? (1998), Dot in the Universe (2002), Doctors & Nurses (2006), Mimi (2013). Her most recent work, Duck, Newburyport (2019) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
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, Evergreen, and 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. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
This book… 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.… [It] demands the very attentiveness, the care, that it enshrines.
Parul Sehgal - New York Times
Brilliantly ambitious…. At times there’s such fury to these ruminations that the book seems to shift into direct cultural critique… 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.
Martin Riker - New York Times Book Review
A book about a mother’s love, but also about loss and grief, and anxiety dreams about Donald Trump, and despair about mass shootings..… It is also a catalogue of life’s many injuries and mishaps… and of the simple joys and consolations of memory and imagination. [A] triumph.
Guardian (UK)
Resplendent in ambition, humour and humanity.… [A] lifetime of memories hoarded and pored over, like the family heirlooms the narrator and her husband have inherited along with all the joy and desolation contained within them.… In Ducks, Newburyport Ellmann has created a wisecracking, melancholy Mrs Dalloway for the internet age.
Financial Times (UK)
Perhaps the most intensely real depiction of the life of the quotidian mind I’ve ever witnessed... what Ducks amounts to is one great trauma diagnosis for the entire country.… It’s a colossal feat.
Spectator (UK)
Ellmann captures the pathos of the everyday, how one might use pie crusts and film synopses to dam in pain.… [The book] also flickers with tenderness… that every individual is owed an unending devotion, and that such devotion, applied universally, might change the fate of the world.
New Yorker
Brilliant—and addictive.… There have been comparisons to James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Ellmann is in a class by herself.
Associated Press
The free-associative stream accumulates into a work of great formal beauty, whose distinctive linguistic rhythms and patterns envelop the reader like music or poetry.… If art is measured by how skillfully it holds a mirror up to society, then Ellmann has surely written the most important novel of this era.
Paris Review
Lucy Ellmann has written a genre-defying novel, a torrent on modern life, as well as a hymn to loss and grief. Her creativity and sheer obduracy make demands on the reader. But Ellmann’s daring is exhilarating—as are the wit, humanity and survival of her unforgettable narrator.
Joanna MacGregor - 2019 Booker Prize Jury Citation
(Starred review) [A] stream-of-consciousness monologue… [in which] plot is secondary…. This jumble of cascading thoughts provides a remarkable portrait of a woman in contemporary America contemplating her own life and society’s storm clouds… challenging but… brilliant.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [A] long, free-association, run-on sentence from the overactive brain of a mother of four…. Is it worth the considerable time and effort required… 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.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Mesmerizing, witty, maximalist…. [A] bravura and caring inquiry into Earth’s glory, human creativity and catastrophic recklessness, and the transcendence of love.
Booklist
[A] Ulysses-sized saga…. Literary experimentation that, while surely innovative, could have made its point in a quarter the space.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
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