2 September 2019
In an accelerated age, the best response is to take your time. There is no choice with Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann's 1,000-page plus novel, shortlisted on Tuesday for the 2019 Booker prize. A bewildering feat of simultaneous compression and expansion, it takes us into the mind of an Ohio housewife as her thoughts run wild - from the state of the nation to the minutiae of daily life. Its narrative occupies a mere eight sentences. Among many other things, it is a rebuke to the consistent downgrading of the "domestic" in literature, so frequently ascribed to female writers, because it insists that our consciousness does not exist in neat compartments marked personal, social, familial, political. Our heads, instead, are a riot.
