Adam Levin's THE INSTRUCTIONS

The rest of the crowd booed. Not so much at Maholtz as the implications of the anticlimax he and I had just provided them. To see an oppressor felled without a hint of violent struggle can’t help but tarnish the shine on your victim badge. To see Maholtz made to cower so easily had to make those who would have otherwise cheered wonder how they, for so long, could have cowered so readily before him. They were booing themselves.

If Michael Pemulis, the very best character in Infinite Jest who is neither in drag nor in a wheelchair, were about five years younger and a student at a Chicago area day school instead of a Boston area tennis academy, he would be Gurion ben-Judah Macabee, the criminally, the messianically precocious hero of Adam Levin's big honking fiction chonk, The Instructions. Except instead of a tennis racket, our boy is packing a weapon of his own devising called a penny gun, and a pocketful of tiny metal wing nuts.

And a brain, an insight into humanity, and an advanced understanding of ethics that would shame any of the Incandenza family, would probably shame a Dostoevsky character. 

I am a middle aged Wyoming woman, neither a 21st century middle schooler, nor a child of the suburbs, nor even a little bit Jewish* so I'm about as under-equipped a reader for this novel as one could ask for, but I read it with admiration and delight anyway.

I was as charmed by its depictions of actually healthy and loving family dynamics as fascinated by its eternal school day themes of intra- and inter-clique politics, petty and serious rebellion, unjustly wielded authority, unbearable boredom, grandiose plans for the future, philosophical speculations both juvenile and profound, concerns earthly and spiritual and, of course, young love. 

But what young love it is: 

Above all, June and I were in love. I wanted reassurance because she’d gotten winked at, but it wasn’t her fault that she’d gotten winked at. It was Berman’s fault. He shouldn’t have winked. He shouldn’t have gotten me wanting reassurance. Especially because there could be no reassurance. That’s what was chomsky. To think that a hand-squeeze would reassure was chomsky. Had June squeezed my hand, I wouldn’t feel reassured; I’d only wonder why she thought I wanted reassurance. I’d worry that she thought I wanted reassurance because Berman’s wink was, in fact, worth worrying about. = If June had squeezed my hand, I’d want more reassurance. And I saw it was good that she hadn’t squeezed my hand. Which isn’t to say I stopped wanting reassurance, but that all at once I saw what needed doing, not to me or for me, but by me: I had to tell Berman not to wink at my girlfriend. Had he not been an Israelite, I’d’ve thought of that sooner, gone straight to confrontation. Instead of burning sweaty seconds lamely sorting useless feelings, I’d have risen to my feet and said, Don’t you fucken wink at her.

A big thinker as well as an over-thinker is Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, who is already infamous when he first shows up for classes in a new middle school, where his prior record of fights and rebellion lands him immediately in the school's special disciplinary unit called The Cage, in which every student is confined to an individual carrel and is closely monitored by a beady-eyed Australian disciplinarian with a name, Botha, that I associate with South African apartheid (I'm sure not accidentally am I so reminded). He doesn't teach, doesn't do anything but watch the students like a hawk and enforce the Cage's infinitely long list of behavioral standards while other teachers nervously present lessons to around 30 fifth through seventh graders, which Gurion is, I think, the only fifth grader by age but, as compensation for his immediate entry to The Cage, the school also agreed to honor his prior promotion to seventh grade on account of his intellect. 

Classic, this. 

But so, Gurion is very, very concerned about justice (and his father is a renowned civil rights attorney), about studying the Torah and about promoting the welfare of his co-religionists to whom he refers as Israelites rather than as being Jewish students. One of his many acts prior to his advent at his current school was to invent a punk little weapon constructed from the top of a plastic soda bottle and a rubber band, and to write out minutely detailed instructions on its construction and use, as well as to design a strict ritual for how this knowledge is to be taught and disseminated., starting with: Only to Israelites. His goal is to arm every Israelite boy in Greater Chicago and beyond with a weapon easily broken down into disposable trash, but capable of launching a small projectile (he uses a penny and calls it, thus, the Pennygun, but we encounter a sort of co-inventor who came up with the same device independently but uses it to fire fountain pen nibs and thus calls it the Pengun). This weapon has achieved a mythic status among devotees of The Instructions as evident from this YouTube clip explaining it.

Gurion also has a loftier project going on than merely helping young Jewish boys to defend themselves from antisemites and school bullies, however; he has been drafting for some time a work he fully expects will one day be regarded as scripture. And many of his former schoolmates, forbidden though they are by their parents from associating with him ever again, consider him a wise leader and teacher, even to calling him Rabbi, and agree that his writings will indeed become scripture. Two of whom, we learn, have even served as translators, necessary because Gurion chose to write about half of the original in Hebrew.

So is this book a very long marriage of The Books of Jacob and Heathers? Certainly more so than it is a descendant of Infinite Jest, for all that I invoked that book at the start of this post. Gurion does feel a bit like Pemulus, but differs vastly from that yachtsman-capped mischief-maker in that, for starters, the closest he ever comes to mind-altering substances is a cigarette or two he is deftly manipulated into sharing with the school's Golden Boy as Golden Boy seeks to co-opt Gurion's growing authority as an outcast leader. Which Gurion only figures out later, but don't you worry. Everybody gets their due in this massive work. Justice is served, like revenge, a bit cold... Or maybe not so cold?

For, on top of everything else, we find that author Adam Levin can write the best kind of action scenes, in which every shot, punch, kick, launch and thwack is clearly delineated, precisely described, but the pace is never allowed to lag. I say this as someone who often skips long flight scenes because I find them boring. But I mean...

By my side, on his knees again, Desormie gripped my face by the jaw and started squeezing. I bonked him with the megaphone. He squeezed unfazed. I got the bell to his ear and flipped on the siren. He threw himself backwards and I started getting up, but my hurt wrist kept folding beneath my weight and Desormie returned and he kicked me in the stomach.

The above is even better if you know who Desormie is. Neener.

And this, from a special sub-plot we can call the Revenge of the Band Kids, in which Levin shows us the weapon in everything:

Their brass scarred from teeth and their padcups askew, the bandkids were blitzing in squads of fours and fives, walking through the mini-riots, mowing down anyone. Cymbalists alternated neckchops with headclaps. Flautists pulled their flutes apart for double-fisted piking. Tubas and euphoniums remained strapped to players who held them under-arm to ram with like jousters. Splinters poked from fractures in oboes used for skullshots. The buttons jammed forever on trumpets gone knuckleduster.

Which is to say that, at heart, The Instructions is a war story at least in as much as the famous Pillow Fort vs Blanket Fort episode of Community was. Well, except instead of blankets and pillows we have actual blows exchanged and projectile pennies, wing nuts and pen nibs fired by Gurion's small army, the Side of Damage (and their junior auxiliaries, Big Ending and The Five, which, get ready for those five scene-stealing Best Buddies**) at their foes, the Arrangement. What, you thought that cover art was symbolic? This is middle school.

But so, my readers may well ask, is this a tale that really needs so many hundreds of pages to tell? Oh, yes. But are they really so satisfying, those pages? Also yes.

And I haven't even gotten around to all of the terrific character drama, the terrific characters, like Gurion's brand shiny new girlfriend, the fierce and fiery and newly-converting-for-his-sake June Watermark. And his best friend Benji Nakamook. And the one they call Brooklyn, as newly arrived as Gurion with even more dramatic a back story, with whom Gurion bonds immediately and who challenges him in ways Gurion usually only experiences with adults. If it weren't for the buddies of The Five, Brooklyn would be my favorite character in the book. 

And there are so many more. By the novel's climatic combat scene, the reader knows most of the Side very well, has watched a few of them fall in love (mutually!) and others learn for the first time that they have power. Usually for the better. Usually.

And yes, like so many books I'm reading now, this one seems to be more important to the present moment than to the one in which it was written, for all that it is a tale that could only take place then (2007), could only feature characters born just before 9/11 and raised doing active shooter drills in school. More than ever I am convinced that the Zoomers, largely the children of my own Generation X, are fundamentally different beings from those of us who remember not having to take off their shoes in public in order to board a plane and when phones were fastened to walls and History supposedly had an End, in whichever way you choose to define that word. Theirs is a fundamentally different world and they are prepared to live in an even stranger one. 

Too, lots of us have been promulgating the "gonna tell my grandkids" meme for years. What if they were to believe us? Because they don't really care? Because they have real problems, but have also at least solved the problem of what to do with all of those pennies lying around everywhere. It's a better idea than CoinStar or whatever. 

We damage we.

All great books command re-reading, but you can’t ever read the same book twice. Knowing, as you do, from the second reading forward, that A will lead to B, to Y to Z, your post-first readings are far more concerned with what exactly happens between those events, far more concerned with those parts you scanned (or even skipped) the first go-round in your rush to discover what would happen next.

Yeah, that's pretty much Gurion, and by extension, Adam Levin, equating their own book with the other great ones. But here's the thing: it is their equal. And I'm already looking forward to reading it again. I underappreciated some of these kids the first time. Including, possibly, Gurion himself!

Damn.

*My nickname at Bard among my soon-to-be dining companions for four years of mealtime shenanigans was "Blond and Blue" as in "Uh oh, Blond and Blue is giving me shit" -- at least until one way discovered that my name rhymes with a famous Dinah Shore ditty that serves as the theme song to, coincidentally, the movie "Heathers" thus guaranteeing me four years of hearing my name sung out loudly and not very tunefully before every meal I ate in Kline Commons. I was a member of an all-gentile cast of the Purim play one year, though...

**I've quoted too much from the climax, but I have to add just one snippet of The Five in action:

The Five were fine too; didn’t need coverage either. Bored with Shlomo, who no longer convulsed, and glimpsing Eliyahu between heads and shoulders, they gamboled toward the south wall, the better to see, a capering troop that undermined its native cuteness shooting mystified kids in the eyes at close range, stepping on crotches and faces on purpose, vociferating multiple Yiddish vulgarities.

These are little guys, maybe ten years old (like Gurion himself, actually, which is part of why, maybe, he takes them seriously where others would pat them on the heads and imagine them in propeller beanies), who have already had enough of bullying but quickly learned that if they can count on each other, they count. And since one of their number got pasted in the halls earlier in the week, they have their own little vendetta against the aforementioned Shlomo, who forfeited his Israelite status when he picked on the shrimp in order to commit a hate crime by proxy. And I mean, one of them even gets to rescue a cheerleader from a groper, with masterful fifth-grade aplomb. Egads, these kids are the greatest!

Otohiko Kaga's MARSHLAND (Tr Albert Novick)

Time is really like an army of cockroaches. I have to force my hands to keep moving; it is like making myself squash cockroaches, one at a time. By my calculations, it takes one hundred finished tags to squash one cockroach.

By the time the above passage hits and makes sense to the reader, she understands the character expressing it so thoroughly that she doesn't even notice how nonsensical these words seem unless she goes back and reads it again later. At the time, she just knows that she feels it deeply, knows exactly what the character means, has been there, too, counting cockroaches with luggage tags. We are in the hands of a master of his chosen form.

It's been a while since I've indulged my love of big, sprawling social novels that 19th century Europe and North America produced in plentitude. There are still many of them I haven't read yet. I've only scratched the surface of Balzac's Human Comedy, for instance, and there are still a few Henry James chonks I haven't read yet, and while I've made a pretty throrough study of the Big Russians, Anna Karenina is still somewhere in my TBR. But I'm a perverse chooser of what to read next, and very much on the sucker lists of Open Letter, Deep Vellum and the Dalkey Archive so of course when I got the urge to grab a mammoth again, I turned to... late 20th century Japan. 

First published in 1985, Marshland is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s and flashes back to even earlier. It is, as I've hinted, a very long and involved and in-depth look at Japanese society, mostly in its post-WWII years but also in earlier times in the life of its hero, Atsuo Yukimori, ex-convict, ex-soldier, and, as we first get to know him, soon-to-be universally vilified suspect in a shocking terrorist attack on Tokyo's train system. 

Atsuo is a very satisfying and meaty character to follow through a realist fictional life, introspective and honest, ashamed but never blaming anyone but himself for his many strayings from the straight and narrow path his poor family tried so hard to set him on. We meet him first as a middle aged bachelor living a very self-regulated, respectable but limited bachelor life in Tokyo, where he is the shop foreman for an auto repair business in the heart of the city. But, as we know from the very first, he has a checkered past, a deserter from this service in the Japanese army during World War II (and we'll get all of the details of his less than illustrious career in the Empire's service), a petty thief, something of a con man, a pickpocket... But we also know, before novel's end, that several of his stints in prison were pretty much entered into by his choice as the only way to stay alive, sheltered and fed through the devastating years of Japan's reconstruction, years that didn't have much use for him as a free man but did offer the chance for him to gain useful skills as an incarcerated one.

But I'm focusing too much on Atsuo, who is about as much the main character of Marshland as McNulty is of The Wire; he's the first one we get to know but is only one of many, all of whose stories matter to the overall narrative and scope of the book. There's Atsuo's vain and self-important employer, Mr. Fukawa and his devious secretary/mistress; Atsuo's nephew, also a worker at the shop and the dormitory "mother" who runs it's employee housing; there's the beautiful young student Wakako, who brings love and romance into Atsuo's life even as she draws him, inadvertently, into the world of student revolutionary politics and the police attention that brings; there are the hard-working, poor and honest members of Atsuo's family and the spoiled, immature but passionate student revolutionaries busy occupying buildings and trashing businesses and preaching doctrine at each other; and the police officers and prosecutors who have been watching them and whose baleful and possibly fatal attention comes to rest on Atsuo and Wakako after a train bombing... And the defense attorneys and private citizens who come together in the name of justice and hope and won't let Atsuo and his fellow defendants give up. All of them have lives and backgrounds and motivations and fears and desires that a good thousand pages or so allow us to explore in considerable depth and lets most of not all of them claim at least a little of our sympathy.

And, in Otohiko Kaga, we have a supremely confident novelist who misses no opportunity to put the emotional screws to us like a detective interrogating a prime suspect. Thus even the moments that should shine through with supreme happiness are tinged with tragedy and despair and bitterness, while those of desolation and enforced solitude still have hints of bitter humor and, sometimes, of possibility.

All of this is accomplished in a sound and unflashy style, so spare and simple that I honestly don't know how much is Kaga's and how much is translator Albert Novick's. Regardless, neither is trying to show off any dazzling chops or experimental elan. They've got a big, complicated, emotionally devastating story to tell and they're too committed to it to mess around with tricks of language or narrative beyond the occasional extended flashbacks.

Kaga has, also, a magnificent gift for nature writing. I have so many examples of this marked, but I think this is my favorite, from when Atsuo and Wakako are out in the Hokkaido wilderness, exploring scenes from Atsuo's childhood when he dreamed of becoming a hermit in the titular Marshland:

Those columns of ice really did take on individual forms as they grew over time, forms that were ever changing; forms that expressed - something. Some kind of will, the will that set nature in motion. That was the thing. This was not human will. There was too much variety there. It was beyond what people could make. In Tokyo the will that moves nature was in hiding. It was hidden by concrete and steel and cars and glass - the things made by people. But the stars showed the will of the creator of the natural world. So did the forest, the sea, the lake.

And yes, partaking in even earlier literary traditions, the state of the landscape is a beautiful stand-in for the emotional lives of the characters as well as the essential changelessness of the world beyond the socio-economic and political struggles of Tokyo and Osaka and Nemuro. Indeed, the final chapter for Marshland is a bravura example of linking the break-up of the ice atop frozen rivers and lakes to the freedom of new possibilities the characters are only just daring to consider as they fantasize about leaping onto an ice floe and letting it carry them out to sea. The beauty is all the greater for having been earned through hundreds and hundreds of pages of every kind of sight and sensation and emotion known to man crowding in on us and seeming like they'll never let us budge.

Anybody out there who's wondering what to put on a syllabus alongside, say, Crime and Punishment or The Portait of a Lady or Middlemarch could do worse than adding this; anybody who loves deeply involving modern-ish narratives like The Wire or just in the mood for the deepest possible exploration of the mid 20th century and how its various tensions and social currents affected real people should block out some time to spend in the Marshlands. This book is brilliant.

NO DUCKS GIVEN: Day Three: 2 January, 2024

the fact that we're broke because I had cancer, the fact that that broke us, it broke us, the fact that I shouldn't say that because here we are, still kicking... the fact that Phoebe helped us out and we'll never be able to pay her back...

I'm not even a hundred pages into Ducks, Newburyport but I can already see that we're going to at least touch on everything that could make a person fret circa 2018 before I'm through the thousand or so yet to come, like an Infinite Jest for grown-ups. Without any embarrassing attempts at AAVE, I'm guessing/hoping.

I went through a year of cancer treatments *at a remove* a decade or so ago, when my dad was diagnosed -- very early by a family doctor who was a little boy when my dad was in his prime, who noticed that my dad's voice had profoundly changed during that doctor's years of medical school and army service -- with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. But he was already on Medicare and so the financial hit was negligible, and the diagnosis was early enough that all he ever needed was a tonsillectomy and a few rounds of monoclonal antibodies and he was still cancer-free when he died last month of Alzheimer's and an opportunistic infection. But if it had hit him in his prime, when that family physician was still a kid and those drugs weren't around and Dad would have had to go the chemo route, it absolutely would have broken us. Our narrator caught a bullet that we dodged. But as she says, they're still kicking; whatever Leo does for a living earns enough to keep them in their house and feeding four children while she does unpaid labor at home and apparently supplements their income by selling homemade pies? Which, how much money can she actually make that way?

By the way, I'm sick of typing "unnamed narrator." Since she seems to have sisters named Abby and Phoebe, I've decided to start calling her Gabby, because her internal monologue is very gabby indeed and it matches nicely with the "bee" phoneme at the end of the others' names. And it was my very own personal nickname as a little girl who made frequent appearances in my mother's newspaper column that she wrote until my sister and I were old enough that we might have friends who could read it and mine it for things to tease us about. She gave us each code names to further shield us a bit: Gabby and Gus. Though everybody knew and none of our school mates were ever imaginative enough to seek ammunition in the newspaper.

Am I trying to hard to identify with this character?

Anyway, it's really mother and daughter relationships that loom large in the chunk I read today. Gabby, we learn, is still dealing with the somewhat recent loss of her own mother, whom she calls Mommy in her head (and yes, this makes my own eyes leak because it's only two weeks tomorrow since I lost my Daddy and yes, I still called him Daddy to his face even as I gave him his last kiss goodbye when he was just starting to turn cold), and her daughter Stacy* is a teenager so disapproving of everything that Gabby does as to make Gabby sort of low key afraid of all teenaged girls. 

We already know that Stacy is quite outraged by what she has recently learned about the history of slavery in the U.S. and successfully has applied abolitionist reasoning to argue her way -- and by extension, her siblings' way -- out of having a share in household chores. I wonder how much longer it's going to be before Gabby is being blamed for Trump (still president at the time of this novel), climate change, wage stagnation, health care costs, maybe even for getting cancer. Angry teenagers paint with very broad brushes.

Another motif that keeps coming up is famous old shipwrecks, first the Titanic and now the SS La Bourgogne of 1898, which hit another ship rather than an iceberg and which is infamous for the poor ratio of crew to passenger survival rate because "the crew kicked and stabbed the passengers so they could get on the lifeboats" and so only one woman was saved and 300 drowned. In Gabby's opinion, the Bourgogne was a worse disaster than the Titanic and I think she has persuaded me. But so, why does Gabby know so much about shipwrecks? It's that what she reads about in her vanishingly small spare time? Did she write papers about them in college? Was she in the Navy before she became a mother, full-time or otherwise? I still have so many questions.

But there are still no ducks, still no Newburyport.

*Whom I'm now more certain is Gabby's daughter from her first marriage, because Gabby recalls buying Stacy a miniature piano at a junk shop the day after Leo proposed to Gabby. And this probably just adds to Stacy's hostility, if she, for instance, resents having a stepdad? Or any of the many other things that children of divorce have feelings about? Unless maybe her bio-dad died and Gabby was a widow before marrying Leo? Like I've said, so many questions!

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.

NO DUCKS GIVEN, Day One: 31 December, 2023

I think 2024 might be my year of reading big fat books that I've been meaning to get around to, and I'm starting with Lucy Ellman's Ducks,Newburyport. At 1022 pages in its original edition, it's what I could reasonably call a chonk.

It's so big, in fact, that I think a regular single post on the book won't possibly do it justice, nor, in all likelihood, would breaking it into pre-arranged parts or pieces like I did with, say, 2666. So I'm going to do it diary style. However much I read in a day, that's how much I'll cover in that day's post. Maybe this will be cool and fun, maybe not.

So! Ok the last day of this dreadful year of 2023, I'm starting my very first read of Ducks, Newburyport. And away we go!

"When you are all sinew, struggle and solitude, your young – being soft, plump, vulnerable – may remind you of prey."

I was not expecting this to start off from the point of view of a mama cat, but sure, why not? We're treated to the experience of having a litter of kittens utterly depending on one in the first week of their lives, and I couldn't stop thinking of that other, entire novel from the point of view of a cat character, Robert Repino's Mort(e), which starts with the titular hero developing a close relationship with his neighbor's dog. Maybe Morte is these kittens' daddy. Who knows? Why not? This whole book could take part between early chapters of Mort(e), before the ants unleash their uplift virus that makes animals sentient. Wouldn't that be interesting?

But wait, no, is this maybe about a mountain lion or bobcat or something rather than a domestic cat, because the "den" is maybe not metaphorical and mama cat is dreaming about hunting because she actually has to hunt to produce milk? But then how much does this matter, because soon enough we're off on a giant stream-of-consciousness on the part of, I think, a suburban mom but now I don't trust my first impression interpretations at all! And if the whole book continues like this, we'll, I can see where it would be hard to break into pre-planned reading chunks so maybe I've accidentally stumbled across the perfect way to blog this?

By the way, I tried very hard to keep away from reviews or impressions of Ducks, Newburyport, having avoided even the season of the Two Month Review podcast dedicated to it, so I'd know as little as possible about the book, going in.

Our main narrator, whom we learn is indeed the parent of four children if not for sure their mother, feels like a member of my generation but I do encounter an unbridgeable divide between her(?) and me: thoughts come around a few times to the Titanic but this book was published before Oceangate so can I even relate to this character now, who doesn't think of billionaires and orcas when the subject of the Titanic comes up? Lo, how swiftly differences in understanding magnify and ramify, but isn't that why we read and write fiction?

Anyway, I find myself liking her(?) so far, even if she does begin every new thought with "the fact that" like a precocious little kid whom you shouldn't have asked what they learned in school today. I mean, I kind of was that kid, back in the halcyon days of the Nixon administration...

Meanwhile, ok, I'm pretty sure the narrator is a woman, a mother, because I've suddenly got strong Nightbitch vibes from passages like this:

...Leo really has no idea what goes on here all day, the fact that he’d probably flip out if he ever found out what’s really involved in feeding, clothing, housing and shepherding four whole kids, kidherding, the fact that my entire life is now spent catering to their needs and demands, cleaning toilets, filling lunchboxes, labeling all their personal property, shampooing and brushing hair, discussing everything, searching for lost stuff...

Amusingly, my Kindle tells me I have 25 hours and 53 minutes left in this book by the time I reach my fairly certain conclusion that the narrator is female. Which means that no, I haven't even read the jacket copy, which no doubt gives that away, right away. Buckle up!

Questions I already have on Day One of this read:

1. Who is this Stacy the narrator keeps mentioning? My guess right now is that Stacy is the narrator's grown, or at least oldest, daughter, maybe from her first marriage (begun in a silver-grey dress) while maybe the rest of the kids are from her second (blue and white dress)?

2. I originally thought Leo was the narrator's one and only husband but later she(?) mentions an Ethan. Leo is spoken of as someone who she(?) should have trained early on to help with the copious housework but later Ethan is mentioned as having a den for which he should get a pinball machine and hey, I want a den with a pinball machine! Can I have a den with a pinball machine? I would want the Addams Family one like we had at DeKline at Bard in the 90s, how about you? How about Ethan? Would Leo also like a den with a pinball machine?

3. What's up with the kitty in the prologue? I'm reminded now, as I ponder it, the lovely, lyrical passage at the beginning of Ursula K. Leguin's The Lathe of Heaven, in which the author describes a jellyfish "current-borne" and "wave-flung" and which I've always thought of as poor George's first effective dream** and that it turned him into the essentially passive character he is for most of his novel. Is this cat something our narrator is imagining or remembering or using as a lens with which to understand her life? Will she turn into a werecat the way the protagonist of Nightbitch turns into a weredog? Or are they destined to meet, woman(?) and cat, in a culminating scene a thousand pages from now?

4. Am I ever going to see a period/full stop again?

5. Is anyone attempting to translate this novel into other languages? Don't tell me it can't be done; I've read lots of Jose Saramago in English!

6. The title and cover art promised me ducks. Where are the ducks? There ought to be ducks. Send in the Ducks. And the Newburyport.

*I'm guessing Leo is her husband. But then, I thought the cat in the prologue(?) was a wee domestic cat though I still hold onto the possibility that the cat could still be a housecat with delusions of grandeur.

**Ugh, now whenever I encounter the word "effective" as a modifier of another word, my brain immediately inserts "altruism" and my mind projectile vomits with tremendous force. The 21st Century sucks so hard.

Blogger's note: I'll probably cover more grounds on this in subsequent days, but I had a big ol' pot of gumbo to make for my family's meagre New Year's Eve, which is already over and it's time for this Little Black Duck to go to bed. More tomorrow. And Tomorrow. And Tomorrow. But for now, Duck off!