Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman

Published: 2019, Galley Beggar Press

Genre: Fiction

Themes: stream of consciousness, family

My rating (out of 5): ❤

I very rarely give up on a book but I am just about to give up on this one.

Ducks, Newburyport is written by Lucy Ellmann and is physically a breeze block of a book. I borrowed it from the library, purely because of it's size, because I needed a stock of fiction for the impending lockdown, and I didn't want to run out of reading material.

The front cover tells me that the book was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize, and that gets a tick from me whenever I chose a library book. There are also very favourable reviews from The Irish Times, The Observer and the Guardian so more ticks for those. On top of that, almost anyone who had a Fiction Pick list for 2019 included Ducks, Newburyport so after noting all that, what's not to like?

Well....

What they don't tell you on the cover is that the book is written in the 'stream of consciousness' style, as in putting every single random little thought into print with no pause for breath.

There are no paragraphs or chapter breaks, and most importantly, no full stops. The whole book is almost one long sentence, although one reviewer claims to have found 8 full stops among the densely typed pages, but that could easily have been a hallucination bought about by a brain demanding a rest.

It is possible to draw the story from the great jumble of words, but what worried me was the constant repetition of a phrase that I just knew would leave a mark on my own brain if I persisted with the book. Anyone who ever bought one of those computer tennis games back in the '70s will remember how the court markings gradually burned themselves into the screen, and whatever you had on screen after that, the markings were always visible. That is how this book is to a very porous mind like mine.

It is also very exhausting to read if, like me, you read a book in your head at the same pace as you would read it out loud. I was desperate for a break. Any little gap in all those letters on the page so I have decided to put it down and accept that I will miss out on this:

'A scorching indictment of America's barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder - and a revolution in the novel.'

Comments

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