I’ve finished Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and haven’t quite got the words to say what an amazing work it is, and how important for American lit+American Studies + for understanding our contemporary moment as well as literature’s capacity to make sense of the senseless. 1/15

But here r some initial thoughts. As someone who has spent the last decade reading+writing about books that are *interesting* and important but rarely enjoyable or hopeful (let alone both),it’s been amazing2 spend 4 days reading something both angry AND euphoric + lyrical. 2/15

It takes a toll on the soul to read horrific accounts of depraved thoughts+behaviours. Like, DeLillo’s Americana is good, Infinite Jest is good, Underworld is good, Pynchon, whatever, but they r good at the expense of giving us any feeling of redemption. This is different. 3/15

The fact that Ellmann is a woman is no coincidence. I’m late to the party, fine, but my god writing by women is such a breath of fresh air. Not to mention that it does ecofeminism better than ecofeminist critics do. 4/15

It’s Joyce meets Shirley Jackson (I have more to say about this) meets Rachel Carson meets Marilyn French if Marilyn French had a sense of humour meets Marx’s wife (did he have a wife? I should know this. Who did Marx’s housework?) meets the best of Sheila Ballantyne. 5/15

It’s DeLillo if DeLillo knew how to write characters.
It’s better than all of these. It’s proof that the novel isn’t dead. It’s proof that we need to read more Ellmann. 6/15

It’s (but this is personal) the first time I’ve felt on a visceral level what it would be like to go back to Minnesota, where I grew up, and see in person the racism, the geophysical devastation, the misogyny, the waste. 7/15

At the same time, it’s immensely gratifying to see Ellmann puncturing various myths about femininity, the domestic, +feminine writing. My fav is the recurring reference to Shirley Jackson. On the one hand this reads as an equating of Trump’s America 2the gothic tropes of We 8/15

Have Always Lived in the Castle. But the text’s discussion of Shirley Jackson’s awful husband invites a 2nd possibility: an effort2debunk the myth of domestic bliss depicted in Jackson’s 2memoirs abt motherhood/housewifery, in which her job as a writer was thoroughly erased 9/15

Ellmann’s novel provides a corrective to Jackson’s sanitised memoirs of motherhood (+marriage to an academic).Where the family in Jackson’s Eisenhower era text has only a broken fridge 2worry about, the family in Ellmann contends w/a fridge broken by a MAGA shooter,leaking 10/15

toxic chemicals (incidentally, mere months after the novel came out Trump spoke about “making appliances great again” by rolling back eco and health regulations including the illegality of certain chemical refrigerants, which makes the shooting scene especially funny) 11/15

Which brings me to the texts’ 140(ish) references to appliances, appliance brand names, and discussions of appliances’ environmental effects, home-making capacities, more or less feminist dimensions,+ symbolic value(s). All of which will be going in the last ch. of my book.12/15

If you r looking for something to fully immerse yourself in during lockdown, this is it. Full disclosure, day 3 of reading it is brutal (I was near tears for most of yesterday) but it is WORTH IT.& you don’t have to take 4 days off to read it, as I did (only to discover it 13/15

actually relates to your work + therefore isn’t holiday reading ). Friends of mine have been enjoying reading it over three months, just dipping in and out. 14/15

And finally, you don’t need to be the daughter of academics, or to have grown up between Italy, the U.K., +the Midwest, or have a sister, or be an English lit person, or be obsessed w/food +people’s looks+descriptions of garbage to enjoy it... but if u r,u r IN FOR A TREAT!15/15