Innovative and hypnotic
READING Ducks, Newburyport might seem a daunting task. First there’s the length: 1,034 pages.
Then there’s the fact that for the most part the novel is written in a single, breathless sentence and there are no chapters, no sections, no natural places to take a break from reading. Furthermore, there is no plot in a conventional sense.
The good news, though, is that Ducks is far from a slog once you have tuned into the voice and the rhythm of the prose. In lieu of sentences the text uses the framing device “the fact that” to introduce new threads of thought.
With the stream-of-consciousness first-person account we are right inside the head of the unnamed protagonist, as her mind hurtles from thought to thought. A second story – that of a mountain lion – runs parallel to this internal monologue and offers an interesting counterpoint.
The woman is an Ohio housewife, a mother of four.
The eldest is a difficult teenager and looks on her mother with disdain, while the youngest is just four. The woman stands in her kitchen, baking pies and cinnamon buns all day because she needs the income after her medical bills for cancer treatment have left the family financially strapped. She is carrying pretty much everything in the household and she is weary of the endless chaos.
At times, her thoughts veer towards more personal issues.
She tries to keep sadness at bay by deliberately trying to push away painful memories, but she obsessively returns to certain parts of her life and we gradually build up a picture of her past.
She is also worried about the state of the world. “I’m sure people haven’t always lived in such a constant state of alarm,” she says as she contemplates war, environmental breakdown, Trump and the healthcare crisis, and school shootings
Mixed in with all this there are playful runs of word association, recipes, dreams, snatches of songs, tabloid headlines, thoughts about books she has read, lines from films (presumably she is watching old movies as she bakes), jingles and tabloid headlines. This is the age of distraction and information overload.
The novel is innovative and hypnotic. We are drawn into an intimacy with this woman, are engaged and entertained and moved by her ... which is just as well given how much time we get to spend in her head!