NO DUCKS GIVEN: Day Two: 1 January, 2024

Last night on Mastodon, where I happily landed not long after Lonny Emeralds turned Twitter into Xitter, I saw a venn diagram that could maybe serve as a back cover for Lucy Ellman's massive torrent-of-consciousness novel,  Ducks, Newburyport.

Ducks, Newburyport, of course, pre-dates COVID-19 and so neither Ellman nor her unnamed narrator knows what an "anti-masker" might be apart from someone who, say, really hates Halloween, but the toddler and mountain lion overlapping just cried out to me to be included in these early days of exploring this literary chonk. 

Our narrator, parent to four children, has certainly had experience with toddlers (and may still be having same; it sounds like at least youngest son Jake is in that age range,  though hey, I dragged a blankie around long into my elementary school years. What babyish habits might the baby of a family not have, really?), and the prologue-cat could well be a mountain lion of she doesn't indeed turn out to be the house cat with big dreams I initially imagined.

But... do we know for certain that toddlers don't also want to kill you? I mean, based on the novel so far, the kids are certainly wearing our narrator down to a nub and not giving her much help in keeping the household going. Her oldest, Stacy, who I'm now guessing is a teenager rather than grown and out of the house, seems to have won the chores/allowance dispute for all time by calling it "slavery" when kids are asked to pick up after themselves or each other, to say nothing of emptying the dishwasher, and so our narrator is trying to do it all. Not sustainable, ma'am. Your toddler alone will kill you (says I with no kids but with a chronic illness that makes me think that maybe I can relate...)!

What's kind of freaking me out so far in this book is how closely the narrator's thought processes and mine seem to match, as her mind wanders to the same homonyms and related yet-unrelated ideas and words. I like to think of myself as a unique individual, but am I, when some fictional character in a big fat novel, a suburban mother of four children (in contrast to my childless spinsterhood) also thinks of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Anne Shirley and Anne Elliott all at once while also considering why she hates words like "extrude." Which means that some novelist put those thoughts together and extruded these thoughts that I've felt were mine alone into a book a few years ago. On the one hand, this is comforting: I'm not alone, our shared culture and educational system have had similar results and given us things in common; on the other, well, of I'm not a unique and beautiful snowflake, then what's the point of me?

There's a podcast to which I'm an occasional and irregular listener, Gen X: This is Why, the idea of which is to explain the weird beliefs and tendencies and habits and hang-ups of people my age through the lens of the pop culture we consumed as kids. Its primary focus is on individual episodes of the TV adaptation of Laura Ingalls/Rose Wilder's libertarian pioneer fantasies, Little House on the Prairie. It's a charming show hosted by a pair of sisters who tease out loads of weird misapprehensions people our age may well have originally derived from that show in the 70s when it was on prime time. I think they're definitely onto something; famously we of the tiny forgotten demographic between the Baby Boomers and most of their children weren't only shaped by being barely supervised latchkey kids fending for themselves after school but by the books and TV shows that were aimed at us. So it actually makes perfect sense that this still-unnamed suburban housewife narrator has thought patterns and cultural touchstones so very like my own, even though I never actually read any Lucy Maud Montgomery.*

I'm beginning to suspect the our narrator, like author Ellman herself, is maybe a bit older than I, or was raised by stricter and more traditional parents than mine were; she refers, for instance, to Charles Ingalls as having an Amish-like beard, which generally means a beard without a mustache, a look far too goofy to have ever suited Mr. Michael Landon )who embodied the character as an absurdly handsome 70s sex symbol with a truly luscious head of hair, but was always clean-shaven, even in black and white as Little Joe, and never mind how he always had a sharp razor and soap and time to preen every day even in a long hard winter of near-starvation). Her Charles Ingalls is a purely literary Charles Ingalls, whereas mine is decidedly a televisual one. Michael Landon intruded on my imagination before Charles Ingalls ever got a chance, because the TV show was inescapable for a school-aged child before I was sophisticated enough to appreciate the books, by which time the last thing I wanted was to read about pioneer kids, who didn't feel different or exotic enough for a girl seeking escapism from 1970s Wyoming, where at least one classmate still pooped in an outhouse when he was at home (and was a Nellie Olson-caliber bully but also knew how to use his fists. Ask how I know) and another had to wear a baseball helmet until first grade because he'd been kicked in the head by a horse as a toddler.

Then, too, there is the fact that her homemaker idol is Irma S. "Joy of Cooking" Rombauer, whose tendency to put mayonnaise on or in everything and love of putting everything else in aspic it seems that our narrator is only now starting to question as a journeywoman adult where I was, if anything, taught to mock the Rombauers by a range of gloriously untidy and slapdash female authority figures who were happy to watch Julia Child on TV but treated her as a fantastic and unrealistic character as weird and exotic and weirdly powerful as, say, Ozma of Oz, whom our narrator has yet to mention as she has also skated around Nancy Drew. I think our paths are about to diverge, as indeed her obvious possession of a candy apple red KitchenAid stand mixer that she claims has paid for itself indicates. And I mean, after all, her author is a graduate of Evanston Township High School, and I know several other such types and, well, none of them have ever had to subsist on a diet of instant ramen and eggs unless they'd blown their stipends on beer for the week, if you know what I mean.

*Our tiny school library didn't have any, nor did our even tinier public library, and by the time the TV show with Megan Follows turned up, I was only interested in science fiction and fantasy and heartily sick of Nancy Drew, which our library had the complete series of and was my rock bottom choice to read that I nonetheless had to read a lot because there wasn't much else. It was the 1970s in Wyoming.