Right place, right tome, long story
Ducks, Newburyport
Lucy Ellmann Galley Beggar Press
Lucy Ellmann’s seventh novel, Ducks, Newburyport, is not what the French call a roman de gare. It has 1,000 pages, weighs
1.1 kilograms and — in the larger of its two spliced narratives — is one vast sentence long. Bloomsbury, Ellmann’s usual publisher, cased the market and rejected the book. Galley Beggar Press, a smaller outfit, was keen to show better taste.
One Booker Prize shortlist later, Galley Beggar was proved correct. Ellmann’s novel isn’t perfect, but something introspective and richly painted is a tonic for us all. It has a double plot: The major one is an internal monologue by an Ohioan housewife, who has four kids, toiling away at home. The minor is the story of a female cougar, who has three cubs, out in the backlands of the state.
Both are therefore portraits of motherhood: of those who protect the fragile things — children, creatures, the environment — that we hold, or should hold, dear. The cubs are accordingly drawn as cutesy, the kids merely “grouchy” from time to time. The worst of the kids is Stacy, a teenage eco-warrior. But she’s fundamentally good, her mother admits, and for those who harbour doubts, Stacy will prove her mettle near the end.
And so we drift in the mother’s head, a dark and witty place, listening to her muse on paella, light bulbs, the Quakers, Skype, all manner of minor things — and, in time, a cougar spotted nearby. Each thought begins with “the fact that,” a phrase you hear more than 19,000 times. Plenty of them are manic reflections on reflection gone awry: “the fact that the mainstream media are craphounds ... the fact that I’ve been corrupted by the internet.” Some are what we secretly thrill to imagine, but never would dare to say: “the fact that maybe Sylvia Plath wouldn’t have killed herself if the weather was better ... the fact that all that rain is kind of a shock to an American.”
The novel’s humour may be coy, but its politics are not. Her mental landscape is speckled with forest fires, mass extinctions and streams glowing with chemical light. There’s a handdrawn map at the end of the novel that traces the cougar’s journey. It’s marked with all the local nuclear power plants, represented by human bones.
And yet, the cougar’s story reads as psychologically amiss. Ellmann’s animal hates all men, not just for their guns and cruelty, but also “the noisy, smelly cars in which they (have) slashed and stabbed and scarred their way across the earth.” Is this first-person prose, or third? Animals don’t have ethics, merely love. More than once, she pads past someone committing suicide and feels a pang of “disgust.” Mankind can often be inhumane, yes — but so are these snapshots of suffering men.
But Ducks, Newburyport is keen to struggle against the grain, make you feel the labour it’s taking on. Its central monologue is repetitive and sour, and that’s apt, now that America, like an unhappy family, seems short on love for itself.