But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son's toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing? With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny.
A heart-rending indictment of America's barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy—and a revolution in the novel. The narrator explains that this unremitting inner dialog keeps her mind occupied so that she does not dwell on unpleasant realities such as the doomed environment and the death of her mother , but this tactic evidently does not always succeed.
The narrator repeatedly professes deep affection for her mother, whom she refers to as 'Mommy. The word combination 'ducks, Newburyport' and 'Newburyport, ducks' appear several times in the narrator's free-association.
The narrator dwells on her mother's cancer and death at a relatively young age, which the narrator says 'broke' her. She considers the way that her life since her mother's death has been marked by grief and ennui, although she also celebrates the things that bring her joy in life, such as her second husband Leo and her children. In the course of the narrator's stream-of-consciousness there are various narrative incidents.
In one, the narrator is delivering pies in the middle of winter when her car gets a flat tire. Having forgotten her cell phone, she waits in her car in the cold for help for an extended period before a tow-truck driver named Jesus saves her. In another incident of stranding, the narrator takes her children to the local shopping mall, where they are prevented from leaving by a severe rainstorm and flash flooding.
The narrator often frets about global problems and how these might negatively affect her and her family. A frequently mentioned problem is the widespread pollution of the world's streams, lakes, and oceans by plastic, industrial chemicals, and pharmacological substances.
The continuous stream-of-consciousness is interrupted only by short episodes of a story involving a mountain lioness. These interludes are revealed by a separate, omniscient narrator. They are inserted into the single-sentence narrative at intervals. Unlike the rest of the novel, the lioness episodes exhibit a more customary narrative structure, with discrete sentences, paragraphs, and a focused, cohesive plot.
Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks 'n' beans? A scorching indictment of America's barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder — and a revolution in the novel.
Bold, angry, despairing and very, very funny, these essays cover everything — from matriarchy to environmental catastrophe to Little House on the Prairie. Things Are Against Us is electric.
These are essays bursting with energy, and reading them feels like sticking your hand in the mains socket. Lucy Ellmann is the writer we need to guide us through these crazy times. The only thing that provides constant solace when times are bad and they usually are is food. Once, when they were children together, they shared not only a family and a childhood, but a secret imaginary world that had a language of its own: Nahum.
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