Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The fact that it’s a book consisting of an internal monologue of a housewife, the fact that it’s juxtaposed against the story of a lioness in the wild, the fact that ‘the fact that’ reappears so much in the first few pages that you almost recoil in horror at the thought of reading this for the next three million pages, the fact that this is not a slender book, the fact that it’s enormous and makes the TBR pile at the side of your bed swell to twice its size, the fact that ‘the fact that’ starts to disappear within moments, the fact that you think you might hate it but then realise you love it, the fact that this reads like Oulipo meets Sarah Kane meets GBBO, the fact that it’s a stream of consciousness, a stream of feminine domestic noise in a way that just doesn’t exist in literature, the fact that the first time this is broken by something more formally punctuated and structured that you almost feel it in your gut, the fact that for pages this can spin into something avant-garde and borderline ridiculous before spinning right back into the world and making all your senses come alive, the fact that the thought of editing this makes me terrified in a way I cannot begin to articulate, the fact that I would have edited this, just a tad, if I had that thankless job, the fact that this book is, despite that, stylistically remarkable, the fact that it is still rather marvellous and terrifying and brilliant all at once even with its flaws, the fact that it is all of this and so much more besides.

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