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!