Reading the Booker prize longlist #8 – Lucy Ellman, Ducks, Newburyport book review

The fact that…this book is so overwhelmingly long and I couldn’t bring myself to finish it.

Confession number 1 out of the way with. All jokes aside, this will be a short review lacking in structure, because as I shamelessly just admitted, I did not finish Ducks, Newburyport. I managed to grab this book from the library after having a nosey a few weeks ago, and it was actually the only one of the Booker prize shortlist that was in there. I decided to pick it up as it was going to save me the £15 I would’ve spent buying it myself. In this post, I will tell you my thoughts, but be aware that I cannot give a full review as I only got 50 pages in before I gave up.

Synopsis:

LATTICING one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of “happy couples”, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks ’n’ beans?

A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.

It’s also very, very funny.

Review:

You know what, tedious experimental literature is not for me. I cannot think  of anything worse than reading Ulysses or anything that large. I really enjoyed Milkman and I love Virginia Woolf, but perhaps because those are more bitesize approaches and I can focus more. The sentences in Ducks, Newburyport all begin with ‘the fact that’, I felt personally victimised by this because of the sheer amount of times I have used the words ‘the fact that’ in essays, arguments and blogposts. The narrator of this book is an Ohio housewife, and I think this was a wonderful choice actually. One thing that I wasn’t expecting from this monster of a text was its readability. It actually flows really well, it isn’t packed with pretentious phrases, and you can almost get away with not focusing too hard on every sentence because it is written in the same way that our minds work. There are constant interjections as various thoughts are battling each other for the narrators attention. It really does feel like you’ve crawled into the inside of someones brain. In the 50 pages I read, I found that everything was in there, from the mundane to the political, it was included. The writing is fabulous and flawless, and I can’t imagine how long Lucy Ellman slaved away at this book in order to perfect it.

So why did I not finish it? in all honestly, it was the length. I had read numerous reviews prior to beginning this book, and I felt that the 50 pages I read gave me a good idea of the writing style and the books purpose. Also, as it was a library book, I was on a limited schedule and having 2 weeks to read a book this large, wasn’t going to happen. I have read so many glowing reviews of this book, but I just felt like it wasn’t for me. I don’t like to have to work too hard to read something and I felt a sense of dread at reading another 50 pages of it. I can appreciate the literary merit and the sheer experimentalism that this book has attempted and for this reason I feel like it is a massive contender for the Booker prize and I would not be at all surprised if it wins.

As I only managed a short fraction of this book, I will not be giving it a rating. Has anyone else read this? or DNF’d it? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Molly 📚💖