Monsterpieces: Ducks, Newburyport

I missed reviewing Lucy Ellmann’s thousand-page Ducks, Newburyport when it was published in 2019, and now scholars are writing their 20-page essays on it. Most are rightly about the novel as a feminist/environmental work but have little to say about its very unusual form and style. Yes, I could write my own original 20-page essay for Monsterpieces, but then, I tell myself, I wouldn’t have the time to review other works. So I’m posting this belated review that concentrates on Ducks as a monsterpiece, one that asks for more time and patience than any of the books reviewed here so far—and one that may give more page-to-page pleasure than the others.

Reviewers in 2019 called Ducks a monster because it’s long and, for literature, chaotic. Let’s start slow. Ellmann has said Moby-Dick is the novel she most wishes she had written, not because of Ahab but because of the cetology that disrupts Melville’s narrative. She doesn’t like “the fact that,” a phrase that appears thousands of times in Ducks, reviewers mention that she is the daughter of the Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, but she admits he talked a lot about Joyce at home. Very early in Ducks, the unnamed protagonist/narrator quotes a phrase—“love’s old sweet song”—that appears several times in Ulysses. It occurs over one day; the first half or so of Ducks occurs in one day. Almost all of the novel records the wandering thinking of an ordinary Bloom-like figure—a woman in Ohio—who processes everything she sees and imagines. In place of literary Stephen Dedalus, Ellmann occasionally inserts for contrast a few pages of a conventionally narrated story about a mountain lion. Like Ulysses, Ducks is a trove of cultural and commercial references—books the protagonist has read, movies she has seen, songs she sings when going about her daily tasks, and details of her business as a baker of pies that, like Bloom’s advertisements, she has to get out and sell.

A more contemporary and less encyclopedic analog of Ducks is Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Like the frazzled Babette of that novel, Ellmann’s protagonist lives in a small Midwestern town, is a one-time teacher, wife of a college professor, caretaker of a mixed brood (four ranging in age from four to fifteen). In White Noise there’s a singular Airborne Toxic Event. For Ellmann toxic events—in the air and water and food—are going on all the time. DeLillo occasionally and randomly inserts into his novel three-word phrases, bits of noise from television. Like toxic events, Ellmann’s random phrases, which expand to associative lists, occur all the time, on every page. “Panasonic” was DeLillo’s working title. Many of the words in Ellmann’s lists are plucked out of media air and correspond to but extend hypertrophically DeLillo’s noise quotient. For Ellmann, our bodies and minds are constantly being poisoned, one of many words I think are keys to understanding the monstrosity of Ducks.

Ellmann may have been influenced by Joyce’s stream of consciousness, but Ducks presents a more up-to-date representation of cognition. For Vonnegut in Galapagos, the big brain was the evolved monster that has ravaged humans and the rest of the planet. Ellmann would appear to agree and offers something like Daniel Dennett’s conception of big brain consciousness in his Consciousness Explained. One of his metaphors for consciousness is the multiple drafts of a novelist, but this is still Cartesian. His better metaphor is consciousness as a congress, a pandemonium of “speakers” clamoring for primacy, competition that goes on, like the pollution mentioned above, all the time, even when one is sleeping. A Joycean “stream” is reductive, ruled by banks. For Ellmann, consciousness is more like a sea, waves breaking and retreating, churning on and on, full of life . . . but also, she notes again and again, pollutants, the microplastics represented by her lists. Scholars tend to suck the political content out of Ducks without recognizing the originality of the consciousness that creates the form in which the content exists.

We are back to Melville’s ocean. Moby Dick is a mighty monster enraged by humans, but in Chapter 59 Melville describes a greater “monster,” known as the Kraken:

A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.

Like the ocean on which it floats, the Kraken is chaotic in its “chance-like” spread on the surface. When Ishmael walks within the skeleton of a whale, he can measure its width and height. Were it to stand on its tail, it would be, like most monster beasts, a vertical phenomenon. The Kraken is a horizontal mass, seemingly “formless.” So is Ducks, Newburyport. It observes some conventions of literary depth, particularly in its attention to the history of Native Americans, animals, and planet Earth. The novel also has psychological depth in the protagonist’s memories of her childhood and years leading up to her current age of 45. But Ducks appears to have no Odyssey giving it, like Melville’s whale and Ulysses, a skeletal structure. [The scholars should get busy on this.] If the word “radical” didn’t have its root in depth, one could call Ducks a radical manifestation of a new version of consciousness that seems monstrous because of its lateral, anti-hierarchical multiplicity, its constant clutching and “curling and twisting.” This conception of consciousness preceded the growth of the Internet, but it is the source of many of the “facts” in Ducks and is a real-world monstrosity that mirrors Dennett’s model.

Presuming that presenting novel consciousness is one intention of Ellmann’s novel, how does she get readers to tolerate her monstrous “pulpy mass” long enough to understand the importance of its representation—and how does she manage in her horizontal form to do the critical feminist and environmental work that she says in interviews is crucial to her? In its materials, its obsession with “the facts that,” Ducks is conventional realism with a massive dose of growth hormone, more various, mundane, and even more banal in its details than White Noise. Ducks resembles the two-page grocery list and lengthy freezer list that Ellmann includes, metaphors for her excess. In the future, Ducks may be read as a heroically comprehensive capsule of Trump time, an encyclopedia of easily recognizable but perhaps forgotten trivia. In this regard, Ellen often refers to Laura Ingalls Wilder and follows the example of her seemingly documentary works about an earlier time.

Ellmann also draws readers into her challenging factual monstrosity with humor and wit. DeLillo makes fun of his male narrator. Ellmann has fun with her female narrator, gentle humor in the interactions with her children, sarcasm about middle class foibles, witty takedowns of gun-toting American men, satire of provincial insularity—and sometimes an Amish-inflected mockery of modernity. The narrator also has fun with herself, most often by correcting some erratic pronoun reference or revealing her minor, laughable failures as a mother, wife, and baker. Though the narrator is a pie-woman, she sometimes sounds like the nursery rhyme’s simple Simon:

Simple Simon went a-fishing,

For to catch a whale;

All the water he had got,

Was in his mother’s pail.

At first, Ducks is the unnamed narrator all of the time, a contradictory monster of humility and self-reference. She thinks of herself as “shy,” as recessive in her relations with others, and much of the text is overwhelmingly her experience. But as the novel goes on, it has the appeal of traditional fiction, for other characters emerge—her children, especially her critical teen daughter Stacy; her husband Leo; the narrator’s siblings and parents, especially her mother whose long illness and death “broke” the narrator; a former husband; a few friends; even old pets. Conflict, though, is mostly with humanity rather than these characters—with industries and power brokers but also with the masses who, like her to some extent, are victims of their own passivity. In this, Ducks is similar, on a grander scale, to the protagonist’s sentiment in White Noise: “I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.”

These welcoming features continue throughout the novel, but from quite early on Ellmann guides readers toward a meta understanding of her formal and stylistic experiment. About a tenth of the way into Ducks, Ellmann has her own Kraken: a huge swarm of jellyfish, cousins of Melville’s squid and a horizontal menace. Jellyfish are, the narrator says,

like weeds, and their numbers are growing fast, the fact that they are moving around in huge gangs . . . the fact that a big swarm of poisonous jellyfish got tangled up in that salmon farm and 56,000 salmon died in agony, in about half an hour . . . the fact that jellyfish are five hundred and sixty million years old, and there are five hundred and sixty million of them wiggling through the world.. . .

Lacking apparent individual identity, jellyfish are like “mush,” another key word, like “poisons,” that occurs many times in Ducks. “All life forms emerged from mush and will probably turn back into mush pretty soon,” says the narrator. Composed of pages-long run-on “sentences,” Ducks is like formless batter before it is baked.

Ducks, Newburyport may not be as “formless” or mushy as it appears. Its title is a nod to the phrase “picnic, lightning,” which is Humbert’s laconic explanation of Lolita’s mother’s death. The novel appears to invite skimming, but readers who do skim risk missing some minute detail that points to a much larger pattern. Because Ellmann repeats “picnic, lightning” and her title numerous times in the novel, the words seem to be an abbreviated comment about randomness. Newburyport is where the narrator’s mother grew up. When she was two, she waded into a pond saying “Ducky! Ducky!” and was saved from drowning by her sister. The “Ducks” of the title refers to two intentional acts, not a random event—the child’s desire, the adult’s rescue. “Ducks, Newburyport” thus reverses the randomness of “picnic, lightning” and points to a pattern of references to saving children, action that ultimately governs the novel’s plot. Given the narrator’s obsession with her mother’s death and the narrator’s anxieties about mothering her children, it’s no surprise that the text includes multiple usages and meanings of “ducks.” Humans are “sitting ducks,” passive in face of poisons. Ellmann’s ducks are definitely not in a narrative row.

As for the choice of “Newburyport,” perhaps it implies a new port from which to explore a fictive ocean. The novel’s setting begins with “New”: Newcomerstown is an actual town in Ohio that, the narrator says, is not very welcoming to new arrivals. Newcomers to experimental fiction may have difficulties with Ducks, though it has much—even the narrator thinks “too much”—to offer if monsterpiece-avoiding readers recognize the novel’s hyper- or super-realism in what seems to be an unrealistic (that is, radically non-linear) form.

In Dennett’s conception of consciousness, notions in the congress of mind that may begin small accumulate weight as they are repeated and gather associations and attempt to rule the internal “debate.” One of the narrator’s favorite words is “nanoparticles.” She says “microbes rule the world” and refers to “microplastics.” Air and water pollution begin with microscopic quantities that become massive, with a monstrous effect on the planet. Ducks proceeds in a similar micro-accumulative way to do Ellmann’s environmental work. The facts she repeats either in her seemingly random lists or in her narrator’s more conventionally conscious moments get weighted. From brief mentions of water pollution, for example, we come eventually to a two-page list of the Ohio creeks and rivers that the narrator and her son test for contaminants. A more conventional writer would have summed the list with a sentence about the number of waterways. The list is not “about”; it is an analog of the facts. In the pages of the text, the list has space and, therefore, weight.

What might be called the analog form of the text is also employed to do Ellmann’s feminist work. Again, she initially offers scattered details about the misuse of or violence against woman, particularly by men with guns. Through repetition and then fuller development, the facts accumulate to a coherent position. Once readers take in Ellmann’s feminism, they can scale out to see how Ducks differs from male monsterpieces. They can also be chaotic but still tend to retain significant rhetorical and intellectual power over their readers. Ellmann “allows” readers of Ducks to follow the Kraken tentacles the readers want. With their attention, readers can weight the repetitions that become positions—on the rights of women, on the rights of labor, on the necessity of not forgetting history, or any other political issue that the novel introduces.

Ellmann’s environmental and gender themes are combined in the novel’s numerous references to Donald Trump, his choices of cabinet members in his first term, the policies that reduce the power of the EPA and increase the effect (and profits) of fossil fuel corporations. Ellmann also refers to his many episodes of abusing women and the language he uses to describe women. Although not as explicit an anti-Trump novel as some, Ducks has in Trump a symbol that brings together her primary political themes. References to Trump are not nearly as common as the explicit ecological and gender references, but one can bring the pattern out of the pulpy mass by reading Ducks, Newburyport, as I have, in digital form and using its search function to see how Ellmann weights the text with the obese president. Ellmann’s narrator notes that Trump once called Melania a “monster” and goes on to say that he is the real monster, the male monster.

The lateral and accumulative monstrosity of Ducks can be usefully compared to what is called “all-over” technique in painting. For such painting to make its pointless point, the canvas often has to be huge, denying the viewer the quick and easy comforts of center and margin. The margins are so far from the conventional center, the viewer has to scan side to side, up and down. Maybe the central purpose of the work is not at its center but emerges from collecting elements from all over the surface. What follows is an example of this all-over decentering work by Julie Mehretu at a San Francisco MoMA exhibit. The painting took up one large wall in the entry hall; the canvas was 32 feet wide by 27 feet high. The photograph represents only part of the work.

Like Ellmann’s “facts,” Mehretu’s base materials, she says, are contemporary and historical—images and texts melted into a collage that is then painted over with irregular, curving lines (like the Kraken). The two boxes on the left are parodies of centering, framing, and traditional scale. What they contain near one edge is no more significant than what is outside of them. Ellmann’s interviews don’t imply that all is equal in Ducks, but it does “argue” that pollution and other ills occur all the time all over the world—including within the box/house that her characters occupy for a modicum (and illusion) of safety.

The title of Mehretu’s painting is “HOWL, eon I.” Ducks includes considerable suffering, but Ellmann’s lists and her “all-over” technique damp down emotional melodrama. Also, within the box/house in Ducks—despite all of domesticity’s frustrations and irritations—are the comforts of family and love. Many of the old movies that the narrator describes are kind of sentimental about domestic life. I wouldn’t call Ellmann a sentimentalist, but she gives tender emotions weight in her monstrosity.

Ducks, Newburyport can seem all middle. Much of what I’ve written above is about the first half of the novel. From the middle on, the novel does slowly change. For hundreds of pages, it seemed the book would take place on one day, waking up the kids, getting them to school, making pies, having a flat tire when delivering in a snowstorm, being saved by Jesus (a Hispanic good Samaritan), getting home for the kids’ return from school. Past the middle, space contracts, time stretches out, becomes vague, and there’s less about the narrator’s activities outside the home, more of her repetitive thinking inside the home—about her childhood, her dreams, her fears of the future, the actors in old movies. And thinking about her thinking, how it oppresses her, requires evasive tricks and digressions, interferes with her relation to her family, makes her at times, she says, a “monster-mom.” The first-half themes are present, but Ellmann is adjusting the weights. The changes in character and text (fewer long lists, less racing from subject to subject) look to be tending toward conventional fictive resolution, possibly an emotional breakdown, perhaps something worse, not “picnic, lightning” but an ending like those in Madame Bovary and Chopin’s The Awakening (both referred to in the text). If readers were initially afraid of the text, its demands, Ellmann manages to make them afraid for the narrator as, she says, she “spirals.”

The alternative text about the mountain lion seems to parallel the changes in the primary text. The lion narrative initially concentrated on her actions. Past the middle, Ellmann imagines the lion’s troubled consciousness after her cubs are lost. And not long after, the cubs are referred to in a news report inside the primary text. In some succeeding sections, the narrator describes lion sightings, public panic, and a tracker’s pursuit of the lion. If the lion’s entry into the primary text is not a fake McGuffin, the lion story suggests that the narrator, with her love of animals and concern for children, may have written the lion story, perhaps after the events described in the whole primary text. If true, Ducks, Newburyport would be a recovery narrative, the narrator finding relief from the crippling monstrosity of her pandemonium consciousness to compose a narrative in complete sentences even her children (well, not the youngest one) could read. [Future scholars should pay more attention to this, too.].

Ducks is one of the most suspenseful novels I’ve ever read, hundreds of pages of suspense. When is something different going to happen? Will the lion be reunited with her cubs? Will there be some resolute action from the passive narrator, some resolution to the text? I can say without fear of spoiling that after worrying on almost every page about men shooting women and children, the narrator must face the fact and act. I can also say that the very long list that ends the novel includes some encouraging items about the future—and the lion. If not a recovery narrative, Ellman’s novel is a survival story despite the toxins outside all persons and inside some persons. As a whole, Ducks, Newburyport is like the ancient Greek “pharmakon,” both a poison (or collection of poisons) and a remedy for readers: recognition.

At the end of the day, at the end of many days reading Ducks, Newburyport, even I, like some 2019 reviewers, wonder if the novel needed to be as long as it is. At half the length, it would be an original and affecting monstrosity. But for anything like a final judgment of this monsterpiece, we need more understanding of its patterns, its possible complexity. When asked to judge sketches by two of her children, the narrator praises one for “intricacy,” the other for “color.” We can see all the color. We need scholars to investigate that possible intricacy. Maybe not devote their lives to Ducks as some have to Ulysses but take some months (or years, if they judge Ellmann unique and profound) to identify all the patterns that make the book an intricate chaos that needs its massive scope to do, like its narrator, its multitasking. One scholar could research the reliability of all the scientific “facts” that Ellmann has her narrator introduce. Another scholar should study all the movies the narrator views and responds to. A third scholar would use current psychoanalytic theory to illuminate the narrator’s neuroses and developing paranoia. Scholar four might do an analysis of the novel’s material culture. The narrator’s husband studies bridges; a scholar may look into bridges as an important metaphor. Then these scholars would organize a conference—like Dennett’s “congress”—to which they and other scholars would present their specialized papers for discussion and “weighting.” The most weighty would be published in an expensive university press volume that would have the title (like Dennett’s) Ducks, Newburyport Explained. I might not buy it, but I’d definitely check it out of the library (and check to see if this belated “review” is cited in the bibliography). In the meantime, take Ducks out of the library, read 200 pages, and see if Ellmann pleases you as much as she did me. If so, you can own the book and keep coming back to it as some readers of Moby-Dick and Ulysses do—with or without the scholarly apparatus I imagine.