Ducks, Newburyport

Ducks, Newburyport was the winner the fiction section of the James Tait Black Award for a book published in 2019. Lucy Ellman has written a substantial novel numbering 998 pages and I must admit that I did not read the book in its entirety. 

For the most part the book is written in one sentence. There are commas but where full stops should be used the author inserts the words 'the fact that'. The story is narrated by a housewife from Ohio and from this stream of conciousness we gradually learn about her family and her thoughts about the state of the world, particularly the USA, in the twenty-first century. Interspersed throughout the work is another story about a mountain lion who hunts for her cubs when they are taken away in a car. This second story is told in twenty-six short segments and normal puntuaction is used.

Themes throughout the book include motherhood, flashbacks to the narrator's early life including relationships with her parents and other family members, climate change and the environment, the USA in the time of President Trump, firearms, illness and death, her cooking and animals. References are frequently made to films and actors, authors and music. There are frequent references to books (for example the series by Laura Ingles Wilder and also the books of L M Montgomery) plus many quotations from a variety of sources. The title of the book is derived from an incident when her mother, as a child, almost drowned.

Once I was prepared to forget about the lack of fullstops and paragraphs and put the words 'the fact that' into the background I found that I became immersed in the writing and the jumping from one topic to another. I read 100 pages and dipped into other sections but, even in a pandemic, decided that I had other things to do.