Lucy EllmannDucks, Newburyport

Abstract

For all my complaining, however, the book has great moments. Take this passage from late in the novel, while the narrator is observing a young boy bullying a young girl (see what’s going here?). He is commenting on his ennui: “It feels like none of it ever happened, or like it didn’t happen to us, or even if it did happen to us then definitely in some former life. A Buddhist said that one time on TV. I mean this whole former life thing. But he didn’t say anything about if you’re in your real life now, or still in your former one.” That’s lovely. And as the book progresses and the kids begin to turn on each other, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t become absorbed. Credit where credit is due. At the end of the day, it could be that I simply didn’t find the book very funny. There might be something lost in translation ; I can’t be sure. Satire like this, if that’s what this is, at least has to be amusing. The extremity of the book, which in itself is cartoonish , is balanced with a straightforward style that continually serves up antipunchlines . A lot of the book feels gray, inert. Like it’s a person stuck in a former life, wandering the bardo, waiting for a boar to come along and shake things up (it’ll make sense when you read the book). The prose feels disconnected. Like the characters. I get it. If I can say something polite to end this review, it is that Totth is committed to the bit. He does not blink. It’s a characteristic that I admire in a writer. He puts down, plainly and relentlessly, this story of cruel children being cruel, and he doesn’t sugarcoat it. But what is the opposite of sugarcoating ? What is it called when someone can’t let off the gas? What are we being forced to stare at, exactly? J. David Osborne El Paso, Texas Lucy Ellmann Ducks, Newburyport Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2019. 1020 pages. DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT opens with a quiet moment of motherhood: a lioness contemplating the awareness of her cubs and the absolute necessity of her being. Life hinges on food and warmth and protection . A page later, human reality interrupts nature as a fast-paced voice permeates the brain. Here, self-awareness meets stream of consciousness, free association meets tense subliminal connections, and a single sentence proceeds for nearly one thousand pages. We vacillate between motherhood and personhood, between housekeeping and clickbait, between rumination and avoidance . Our narrator is a stay-at-home mother who describes herself as “at the mercy of four little American brats.” Initially, her narrative is not so much a story as a playby -play of her daily life, thoughts, and memories, with occasional analysis and clarification, though she stops short of probing her deeper feelings. She holds back nothing when it comes to wordplay and associations, and often words and images snowball into a chaotic thought that ends figuratively but never literally. Each thought begins with “the fact that,” but the narrator is not merely aware of these so-called facts. She has fully internalized them, blurring the space between fact and statement, blurring the space between self and the external world. A random Seinfeld line stands alongside personal memories that appear no more meaningful than plots from Laura Ingalls Wilder. As I read, the gap between her thoughts and the outside world diminishes further; her thoughts become my own, paralleling the ways that noise becomes our normal. Her facts blur with my own broken water heater, the stresses of grading papers, a recent Lily headline reading “My Mind Will Not Turn Off: This Is How I Experience Anxiety.” This book is a representation of what it means to internalize everything. Using “the fact that” as a constant refrain brings, front and center, the current debate on truth and objectivity. But perhaps this structure demonstrates the difficulty of objectively analyzing information after we have so fully consumed it. Internalized information is personal and protected as such. Ellmann has re-created information overload...