Life Sentence: On Lucy Ellmann's "Ducks, Newburyport"

Lucy Ellmann | Ducks Newburyport | Biblioasis | September 10, 2019 | 1030 Pages

The most immediately striking thing about Ducks, Newburyport is that it is composed of one recursive, 1000 page sentence, anaphorically linked by clauses that begin with the refrain, ‘the fact that...’ There are brief adjournments in this rather unrelenting prose coming in the form of snippets about an escaped lioness from a zoo, but besides other than these respites, the main subject is a mother of four who ruminates on her baking, Ohio, Einstein, the American Civil War, David Attenborough, Laura Ingalls Wilder, old films and many, many other topics in an endless looping sentence. We discern certain events that happen to her, but what we’re given access to in the form of this nameless narrator is a rather extraordinary depiction of a mind that resembles a swirling nebulous of information, and thoughts returning and doubling back on themselves over and over. 

On first reading, you might think that Ducks is a significant departure from Ellmann’s other, shorter, more playful works. Her usual publisher, Bloomsbury, evidently thought as much, as Galley Beggars, an independent press based in the UK, picked it up (Biblioasis picked it up in the US). Ellmann’s fiction seems to have always had this capacity for the philosophic and inventive whilst being writhed with a scathing humor. Dot in the Universe (2003) was a short, lewd meditation on sex and death, in which Ellmann wrote, “Love is bound up with the body, no love in the Underworld.” Whilst Ducks isn’t as directly concerned with the afterlife, we could say that with us as readers lost in this never-ending maze of a mind, a body of sorts is threatened to be left behind. After all, while baking her cinnamon rolls, the narrator (despite, or perhaps because she is presumably middle-aged) is overly concerned with death. She has watched her own parents die and survived cancer herself, but this internalization of the mind plays out in a tension with a significant geographical and physical attention to the world, and it’s as though the narrator is holding on tight to whatever is around her.

It would be trite to say that Ellmann is using this tension to depict something as nostalgic, or ‘Modern,’ as the extraordinary in the ordinary (even though the narrator’s consciousness is indeed extraordinarily depicted), but it is a question of how the ‘choices’ we make internally come to pass in the world around us. That the narrator lives in Ohio, a state which is a ‘predictor’ in a national electoral democratic system, it’s no wonder that this novel about choice and causality is situated here. Like the novel, the mechanisms of a ‘swing state’ are complex and intricate. What would a harbinger look like to this narrator when the choices and events of her past have become so restrictive, clouding any opportunity to visualize and move beyond them? This novel is a sentence after all, one that feels like it may never end. 

This is why I didn’t necessarily feel that the narrative was a ‘stream’ of consciousness. Instead I see a complex interplay of mirages and screens for other thoughts and possibilities that are trying and failing to break out of the narrator’s mind, rather than break in. Perhaps the narrator is another dot in the universe, stuck in a kind of stasis, unable to move forward. She does in fact, often riff on the Universe, about Pluto in particular, and in this light we might see why:

‘...the fact that it took the biggest rocket ever to get this fridge thing, New Horizons, launched and it took nine years for it to reach Pluto, nine years, the fact that the pictures it’s sending back travel at the speed of light and take four and a half hours to reach Earth, the fact that the ship is three billion miles away and now it’s heading further out, the fact that it didn’t stop on Pluto or anything...’

Notably, in 2006, Pluto was ‘demoted’ due to its size and re-categorized as a ‘Dwarf Planet.’ This conundrum then of looking at an image of Pluto (what is the Universe to us but images) where the image of Pluto is essentially out of date by the time it reaches the perceived is similar to how she relates to other images that enter her mind. This power, or lack thereof, to reframe our thoughts after the event whether that be hours or years, is called into question again when she thinks about films:

  ‘...the fact that Fred MacMurray plays a bad guy in The Apartment, and a guy who turns bad in Double Indemnity, but in that other one, There’s Always Tomorrow, he’s just a poor neglected husband, the fact that he ends up staying with his wife that time instead of running off with Barbara Stanwyck, Rex the Walkie-Talkie Robot Man, Hollywood Spats, Spats in Some Like it Hot, “Zowie!”, “Goodbye, Charlie,” the fact that The Sound of Music has such a gloomy undercurrent, I don’t know, the fact that, to me, Nazis seem a bit out of place in a musical...’

Of course, they are all actors, but she’s grappling with the fact that somebody can be a ‘bad’ guy in one film and then a poor neglected husband in another. The images of the Nazis trouble her even further, but like the images of Pluto, what do the actors represent other than people out of place, stuck in certain moments in time? This sounds rather transferential when we consider it light of  the narrator’s relationships. We get glimpses - mainly - of her relationship with her mother, before we finally reach a long section toward the end where the narrator effuses her mother’s ability to battle an illness, be a mother, and write (interestingly, Ellmann’s own parents, were renowned literary critics). There is a sense of impenetrableness at reaching this part of her psyche.

The narrator brings up and conflates two important themes when thinking about a different classic film. In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the cause of the horrifying bird attacks is a mystery. It’s a film however, that returns to the narrator (recurring in her thoughts, we might say, like the bird attacks) and there’s a sense of caged retribution therefore, as though continually waiting for the consequences of a decision she has or might make:

‘...the fact that I usually get goats milk, soya milk or rice milk instead, for lactose-intolerant cinnamon rolls, the fact that they imprison the bees to make almond milk, the bees that fertilize the almond groves, the fact that I don’t know why they have to be imprisoned but they do...’

Doesn’t this read like a ‘bird attack? Here, this repetition that seems ingrained in the narration also links with a sense of impenetrableness, begins to reframe itself as a way of querying what it means to ‘master’ something. On a certain level, this isn’t an oppressive motion and is instead a question of being able to ‘master’ and simply understand one’s place in the world. She comes back however in that passage, to the image of the imprisoned animal. If we look at the story behind Hitchcock’s film, knowing that Tippi Hedren was horrendously treated and harassed, maybe there is a suggestion that pivoting some of our choices and causes, there’s a narrative of pain and dominion that we can only conceal and cage up but not easily escape. 

Interestingly, the ‘organizational guru’ Marie Kondo, who famously tells people to only retain that which gives us ‘joy,’ is referenced by the narrator, and it’s at this point that you realize what the novel is, in some sense, about. The narrator’s mind in Ducks  retains all that which causes her pain and sadness - as well as joy - and it’s not always a choice, not always a pleasant narrative that we can tell to and about ourselves, about those choices and about future choices, that allow us to master them. The sense of living by a choice that isn’t really our own is increasingly the norm, and increasingly dictated by a larger entity (Trump’s America, Brexit Britain, Syrian Kurds having the rugged pulled from under them by the US).

Too often in reviews of long novels, the reviews overtly become about the question of whether or not whether the reader should expend the time and energy to read the whole thing. But Ducks, Newburyport isn’t so much about an investment of your time: instead, the time you’ll have with this novel, whether that be a long or short period, is the kind of time you’d spend with a companion in that it becomes secondary to how much more those moments represent.

This review is part of our Contemporary Literature series, where we review books that traditionally gain traction outside of the midwest in order to bridge the intellectual gap between Cleveland, the Midwest, and the coasts, and create an arena in which all three can be in conversation with each other on equal footing.