I had a sort of half-baked theory for awhile that massively long novels, especially of the difficult, formally experimental variety, produce a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where you kind of have to find them brilliant and worthwhile, because you’ve sunk so much time and effort into them. So I was weirdly, pleasantly surprised to find that I didn’t feel this way about Ducks, Newburyport! I mean, I do think it’s sometimes brilliant and overall worthwhile, but I also think that it’s got some flaws — the biggest one, unfortunately, being the finale, which is sort of like taking a beautiful souffle out of the oven and watching it sink before your eyes. Honestly, I don’t know if I would have made it through the whole thing if I were trying to read it, but I listened to it on audiobook, which I really recommend. The narrator does a terrific job, and I really think it’s the best way to experience the text.
I feel like I should say up front that my thinking about the book is strongly shaped by my friend Elisha’s brilliant work on it. She talks about the mountain lion — which nobody else talks about; it barely even gets mentioned, and it’s SO so interesting. I don’t want to be coy or anything, but you’ll have to wait to read Elisha’s book to hear her ideas about it. Super cool stuff. But I mention it because it meant that I entered the text already having the sense that a certain thread of it, which many people ignore, is in fact fascinating and very important, and so I arguably paid attention to it in a very different way than many readers.
When I went looking for reviews online after I finished reading, I found that most of them were written by people who made a point of saying that they don’t often read books this long. But I would actually like to read a review by someone who has read a fair share of Very Big Books, because I am interested in the question of what makes such books Big — is it more of the same, or is there something qualitatively different when you upsize, a change in scale? Is the Very Big Book its own form, or are its forms many?
This one is I think interestingly set apart, in that it is, not a monologue exactly, but something like a narrated soliloquy. I’m reading Paul Dawson’s book, The Story of Fictional Truth, right now, and one of the fascinating things he points out (that I think he gets in part from Dorrit Cohn) is that although we typically think of the first-person voice as, basically, autobiography, and more specifically, as a person sitting down and writing their story, in fact, experimentations with the first-person voice really take off when they free themselves from the need to account for how they are written. That is, it’s no longer the pretense of someone sitting down to write, or telling a story — they become like a third-person narrator, a voice from nowhere, just … in the first person. This is crucial for this book, because it’s clear, at moments, that we’re not just hearing the protagonist’s thoughts — most obviously, because every so often, we’re following a mountain lion instead! But also, there are moments where her experiences seem to be narrated in real time — ouch! I just stepped on that lego! — and then there will be jumps in time, like it’ll be days later, which alerts you to the fact that whatever the scene or conditions of narration are, they aren’t consistent.
This aspect of the narration is relevant, because it connects to the question of the quality of the book’s bigness. Of course a monologue could go on until the character dies, that is to say, for thousands and thousands of pages. But honestly, I think it would get boring. This book depends on the ambiguous conditions of its narration, both to skip ahead to some meatier content, and to loop in the mountain lion. Those aspects make it more like a third-person, plotted novel, in some sense — there’s a degree of narrative control that isn’t available to a stream-of-consciousness. Still, I think this book really couldn’t be too much longer without being too long (actually, it might already be a touch too long).
Also, I think it’s stacking the deck a little bit to make the protagonist a former teacher of college English. It provides cover to sprinkle the text with various literary references, and bits of Declan Kiberd lectures, and while it’s sort of a fun winking nod to Joyce, the inevitable reference for formally experimental big books, it almost seems to suggest a sense of insecurity, a lack of faith that the story would be interesting enough on its own without those parts. They feel a bit like they were thrown in for the sake of English professors.
What I think the book does really, really well is evoking a sense of just how much ambient awful shit a person takes in, living in the US now (or 2018, I think is when the book is set). So many mass shootings. So many awful stories of really horrific cruelty, sudden violence, or some previously unconsidered atrocity of history that get casually dropped into your day. How is a person supposed to live with this knowledge? And how do you figure your relative privilege and security alongside what seems like an escalating tide of “random” violence, not to mention the increasing impacts of climate change, that really does make it seem like no one is safe? What times we live in!
I also really admired the way that you would get these sudden flashes of a very different perspective on the narrator. Not that she was unreliable, exactly, as that you came to realize that she was in some ways opaque to herself, and that being in her head did not necessarily mean that you got a consistent perspective on her behavior in the world. Especially because of the jumps in time — so, for example, there’s this moment when she says something like, ‘wow, what happened to me last night that I screamed at my family like that?’ Which, on the one hand, makes you realize that some large chunk of time has gone by unaccounted for, but on the other, also makes you wonder — yeah, why did you scream at them? How did that look from their perspective? Another area where this question arises is in her relationship to her daughter. We get a lot of insight into how she feels about her; what she wishes she could say, etc, but actually very little about how their conversations actually play out.
It is a really interesting book, overall. I definitely felt immersed in the character’s world, and worldview — like this was a person I’d gotten to know really well, and certainly could often relate to, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’d want to be friends with her. But that’s not the point — the purpose of the novel is not just plunging you into the character’s consciousness, I don’t think. It’s rather that it invites you to notice aspects of contemporary society, and life in it, by noticing the architecture of their interrelation in the novel, which is partly in her head, and partly arriving into her thoughts abruptly from the outside — from the radio, or a conversation with a friend. Maybe this says more about me than about the book, but I think it’s actually a fairly terrifying view of today’s world.
Kasia Reads 