Nobody has captured the direction that modern America has headed in quite like Lucy Ellmann. While many would argue there is this need for a grandiose political allegory of power corrupting, her approach is something a lot more in tune with the moment "Duck, Newburyport" is a firecracker of a novel that transcends the need for conventional narrative structure and instead uses a freeform look into the mind of a midwest housewife in an effort to understand the distracted nature by which many live their lives. With an endless array of information being thrown at us on any given day, it' hard to make a novel that perfectly encapsulates the madness of living in America in the late 2010s. For its many flaws, Ellmann has done the next best thing. She has created a perfect exploration of anxiety and self-actualization existing alongside each other, often within the same thought, as she removes the rigidity of language and replaces it with a breakneck speed. Can a life be perfectly embodied in a single sentence? In truth, it's near impossible. However, she achieves the next best thing.
If there's any reason to read "Ducks, Newburyport," it's because of its novelty. Over the course of nearly 1,000 pages, Ellmann attempts to create a stream of consciousness by replacing punctuation with one long run-on sentence. It's an effort to put the profound next to the banal and create this interiority of a figure who is largely immobile and indirect. There is no concrete detail about the world outside her head. There are observations, but this is a novel that can get caught up in laundry lists of fact checking and recalling a past. The reader can envision things, but to make something truly concrete is a fool's errand. This is kaleidoscopic with many ideas developing dozens of pages apart and sometimes out of order. Odds are that a handful will even be callbacks hundreds of pages further on when it feels like the necessity has been exceeded.
To be clear, this isn't a novel that one reads to have the fulfillment of a conventional novel. This is akin to the "Penelope" chapter of James Joyce's "Ulysses" where it's a string of thoughts that just run on and on, creating this deeper understanding of a world the reader would otherwise not know. Despite being cloistered to the outside world, there is an understanding that makes the reader understand their selective sharing of knowledge. If there's any issues, Ellmann is far less artful about her efforts than Joyce, replacing punctuation with the phrase "the fact that." It's a series of words that feel like a bit of a creative cheat and keep the novel's larger spontaneity from fully sinking in. Even then, the organization creates this beat poetry style approach to the mind, working as much as a period as it is a slash or semicolon.
The issue is that because the novel lacks conventional conflict or world building, it's not a text that feels rewarding as a larger work. At most, this is an achievement at capturing the feeling of the metaphysical. This is the closest that a novel has come to capturing the nature of a mind to jump around to endless thoughts often on a microsecond level. However, for all of the information that forwards the understanding of the protagonist, it's all a bit underwhelming when all is said and done. The most intuitive of readers may become in tune with thinking like Ellmann by the end, and that is in itsself a triumph. This works as an empathy machine, but very little else. It's likely that the reader will forget the majority of this text within six months, if not shorter.
On the bright side, they may never forget the larger experience. For as tedious as the endeavor is, the novel does create something wholly unique. Because it's so interwoven with the self and its social placement, the reader can come to understand what it's like to live in America following the 2016 election, where the fears of change and rise of misinformation fight the attention economy and attempt to remove a sense of self. "Ducks, Newburyport" holds onto that authenticity for as long as possible. Even as it sllips through the fingers, there is no signs of giving up. For as much as there's no larger rhyme or reason to the text, it's a lesson in encouraging readers to not give in. There is a need to keep thinking and questioning the world around them. It may produce a lot of dumb, useless thoughts, but they'll be yours. There may be more diplomatic novels written about this time in the decades to come, but none have the frenetic immediacy of Ellmann's novel and for that, it's worth consideration in the larger canon.
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