Through no fault of your own you may not have read Lucy Ellmann’s half-dozen previous novels, ranging from Sweet Desserts (1988), which won the Guardian fiction prize, through Dot in the Universe (2003) to Mimi (2013). They are often dismissed as whimsical, bizarre and self-indulgent, novels just too wayward, too angry and too weird, made up of raging torrents of thoughts, ideas, memories, wordplay and sheer WAH!
Well, the good news is that with Ducks, Newburyport, Ellmann has clearly weighed up the opinions of her critics and the pros and cons of her trademark style, considered her options, and thought: “Damn the lot of you, I’m going to continue to write exactly the kind of novel I want to write, thank you very much.” In this case it turns out to be around 1,000 pages of an Ohio mother of four and homemaker worrying, mostly in one long sentence untroubled by full stops. She luxuriates in troubled descriptions of food, American family life “and the fact that the whole country’s gone crazee almost”. In her latest novel Ellmann doesn’t just carry on as before: she doubles down, doubles up and absolutely goes for broke.
And it works. This may just be because everyone else has now caught up with Ellmann’s unapologetically super-self-conscious style. Readers who have been exposed to the work of, say, Sarah Manguso and Rachel Cusk, or even Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, will recognise Ellmann’s dauntless cataloguing of desires and hopes and fears, and her refusal to be anything other than endlessly curious and utterly self-directed.
But there’s more. As well as Ellmann’s radical adherence to the idea that a novel might contain and appropriate anything and everything, and might therefore risk resembling a form of disorganised mental chatter, there is also in her work a thoroughgoing commitment to certain kinds of everyday human stories: in particular to the common longing for peace, love and understanding. This often gives her antic style a strong contrary motion towards a lulling kind of calm. In Ducks, Newburyport these two powerful impulses work together. Anne Tyler gets quite a few nods of appreciation throughout the book: well, imagine if Tyler wrote like Gertrude Stein.
The book’s unnamed narrator is middle-aged and on her second marriage, to a kind man named Leo, who is an academic and engineer (“a cross between Stanley Tucci and Walter Matthau”). She has given up teaching history at college and become an expert pie-maker. Alongside her bright, brilliant rages as she stands in her kitchen and surveys the state of the nation while cooking up another consolatory batch of pies, the novel also contains a story about a mountain lioness, prowling outside, who does everything to nurture and protect her cubs. These two parts of the novel eventually come unexpectedly together, along with a hilarious, shocking confrontation with one of its many inexplicably angry men, who is intent on harming others and gorging on the narrator’s cookie dough.
So, it’s a book about a mother’s love, but also about loss and grief, and anxiety dreams about Donald Trump, and despair about mass shootings and preppers and “the fact that Open Carry-type guys are always quoting from the Bible, and you get tired of hearing it all, the fact that can’t they read something else once in a while, like Babar or something”.
It is also a catalogue of life’s many injuries and mishaps – the narrator undergoes a heart operation and gets cancer – and of the simple joys and consolations of memory and imagination. Ellmann’s wordplay is continual: “I’m always playing catchup, Ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, coleslaw, BBQ sauce.” If you like this sort of delightful silliness, there is a lot of it: “the fact that maybe all parents like to see their children sleeping, partly because it means the parents can take a break, a coffee break, recess, recuse, breakdance, beatboxer, gravity benders, the fact that that dog on YouTube playing the piano and howling really seemed to be enjoying himself”. “The fact that” is the repeated phrase that holds the book together, making it into a kind of tally of what’s happening now, what has happened and – alas – what might happen in the future.
In many ways, the book reads like a culmination. This is partly because of its extraordinary length and bold rhetorical devices, but also because it brings together elements from all Ellmann’s previous books: her great love of lists; the endless references to popular culture; the roarings and forebodings and glorious meanderings. I could tell you the significance of the ducks of the title, but that would cheat you of one of the great pleasures of the novel, which is just sticking with it and allowing the author to determine the pace and rhythm at which you read. “This book will either be a success or a failure,” remarks one character. “Nobody wants to hear that,” responds the narrator. Fair enough. Success? Failure? Triumph.
• Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann is published by Galley Beggar (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
