Beth Bonini's Reviews > Ducks, Newburyport

. . . the fact that you lose a family member in a shooting and the other shooters in the country pile on and threaten you with death, the fact that everybody hates on you, just for mentioning your loved one got shot, and for not immediately shooting the shooter back, the fact that it’s almost like we’re in a war or something, the fact that everybody just seems to bear a big grudge about something or other that they’re read to kill and die for, the fact that what ever happened to gentleness, kindliness, the fact that does life have to be like this, so black and white, lemon meringue pie, landfill, radioactive waste, Aurora shooting, aurora borealis, Littleton, Orlando, Pulse nightclub, Fort Hood, Texas, Carthage, Virginia Tech . . .

Lucy Ellmann is not the first person to write a stream-of-consciousness novel, but she has definitely achieved something original, striking and relentless in this 1000 page run-on sentence bullseye of contemporary American culture. The narrator is a 40 ish year old mother of four who lives in Ohio and bakes pies and cakes for a living. She is a bundle of anxieties, some of them probably universal and some of them quite specific. The author plays with the idea of ‘apple pie’ American domestic life, of motherhood in particular, and then muddies the stream (of consciousness) with a barrage of commodities, brand names, film plots, novelistic references and historical events mixed in with the narrator’s own personal history and a slender thread of a plot-line. After more than 900 pages, something dramatic does actually happen - so don’t just read 650 pages or so and feel like you have absorbed all the novel has to offer you.

Alongside the narrator’s mental flow is a parallel narrative involving a lioness (a mountain cougar, an endangered animal) and her cubs. The idea of ‘Mommy’ - the importance of maternal love - is absolutely central to the story. In contrast to the idea of the mother - to mother’s milk - is a barrage of information about the environment and the gun culture of the US. It’s the gun culture, specifically, which makes this an unmistakably American novel.

Once you accustom yourself to the unique style, it’s not ‘hard’ to make sense of the narrative; it is, however, despite its humour and flashes of brilliance, rather exhausting to read. I had to read it in small bits, sometimes in only 5 page bits. It was both entirely appropriate, and rather too close to the bone for the Trump-and-coronavirus dominated shitstorm that was 2020. I started it in February and finished it on the 5th of December. Definitely an unforgettable reading experience.