Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport

- A brilliant novel, truly a masterpiece. But few people, excluding most Booker Award judges I suspect, would have persevered and read all of it. It’s a challenge. But goddamn it, it just sucks you in and I got thoroughly immersed in it.  

- The principal, unnamed, character tells the story of her own life and times (‘this monologue in my head’). She’s now in her mid-40s and has had a sad, frustrated, ordinary, happy, satisfying, insecure, guilt-ridden, productive life as a child, a sister, a wife, a small business owner, and a parent. She misses her own mother terribly, and had a difficult relationship with her father. She’s not crude or vulgar in any way. She’s intelligent, aware, caring, angry, over-sensitive, anxiety-riddled, hardworking. Her husband Leo, who calls her a ‘domestic engineer’, absolutely adores her. She’s also a cancer survivor. And, importantly, she’s an absolute delight to spend so much time with. (It took me three weeks to read this 1040 page brick). She has to be one of the greatest female characters in American literature. She restored my faith in America. 

- Fundamentally the major narrative thread weaving this incredibly rich tapestry together is the story of a family - parents, grandparents, marriage breakdowns, kids, step kids - and the deep emotions permeating it all. Particularly in being a mother.

- Her four kids (Stacy, Ben, Gillian, Jake); her loving husband Leo; her garden; her pets; her chickens; her favourite movies and TV shows; the countless words she hates (especially those starting with ‘ex’ if they also have a ‘u’ sound, like extrude, exude, excommunicate); people she hates, eg Trump; Pence; old household objects; lines from songs; constant riffs on all sorts of things; home cooking traditions; random bits and pieces of ordinary domestic lives. She’s ‘wallowing in domesticity’. She’s incredibly knowledgeable about plants, food additives, birds, all sorts of natural world minutia. She’s a Jane Austin fan - the books and movies, and reads Anne Tyler and Joyce Carol Oates. She has a brilliant and formidable mind, always on show, and is very politically, socially and environmentally aware. In fact she’s a linguistic genius, utterly obsessive and verging on outright crazy. (And, not surprisingly, she rarely ventures onto social media). 

- The expression 'the fact that’ appears every three or four lines and acts like a full stop. It breaks up the statements and rants. You get used to it and it doesn’t annoy after 30 or so pages in. 

- Ellmann, through her character, celebrates American folklore, history, geography, literature, music, film, and popular culture generally. There are constant references, all informed and often cheeky. Abbreviations litter the text, and are spelt out in the Glossary. Eg POTUS doesn’t stand for President of the United States but for Purveyor of Totally Unprecedented Sleaze!

- She has a fascination with words that rhyme, suggest, resonate, and sound quirky, that just enter her head as she thinks. And she loves comprehensive lists - American desserts, meals, pies, drinks, food chemicals, fish dishes, sandwiches, creeks, islands and more. She’s got a thing about male gynaecologists. Why are they even allowed? 

- This is America in all its dimensions. And an honest, frequently savage critique - of racism, provincialism, Indian massacres, environmental destruction, contaminated water, corporate malfeasance, Fox News, Open Carry guys, school shootings, gun laws, paranoid police. She is a voice from the deep psyche of America. A voice of reason.

- Every once in a while there are two pages about a lioness and her cubs. Standard punctuation applies. They are sentenced and paragraphed (91-93) in the third person voice. The mother is protecting and rearing her cubs, so very natural. A major focus of this novel is motherhood. But when the lion is spotted by townsfolk fear breaks out among the population as if it’s a migrant or terrorist invasion. 

- Why have so many reviewers of this book called it funny, as if that’s it main feature? ‘Hilarious, eye-wateringly funny’ (Scotsman); ‘Hilarious’ (Bookmunch). (God, I hate that word hilarious, and I bet Ellmann does too.) These reviews are shallow. Even the blurb on the back cover says ‘...unforgivably funny’. Sure, it is often funny, and a constant comic tic is the clarified subject reference, eg ‘... and I’d try to draw them on top of the cake, the toys, not the moms’. (Ellmann indulges in this device far too much, at least once on every page, and it becomes tedious in the extreme). But comedy is not the book’s dominant feature, and it does a profound disservice to it to be described in this way. 

-(The original publisher of this huge tome, Galley Beggar Press Limited in the UK, deserves profound respect, and not just for publishing it. There is not one proofreading error in the whole 1000 page book. But editorially, the half dozen references to ‘koala bears’ are unfortunate (KOALAS ARE NOT BEARS. THEY ARE MARSUPIALS).