DUCKS reading support group discussion
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Ducks, Newburyport
some pre-reading discussion and reviews
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YESSSSS I have also read those comments. GOOD LORD
“Ulysses has nothing on this” - Cosmopolitan
Fact: Lucy Ellmann is American but has not lived in the US since her teen years. I noticed at least one Britishism in my first pass (Coco Pops! Lady, we eat COCOA KRISPIES)—but I have also not lived in the US since I was 22. So why has she written about America?
She has very good reasons. There is an interview with her in the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...) where she says, “The narrator is in some ways the person I might have been, had I never moved to Europe. But anyway, I never really left the U.S. in my head. Marrying an American reinforced my American affiliations, even my accent. My husband and I had both lived in Britain for years, but pairing up seemed to consolidate our Americanness. Brits born after we ourselves arrived in Britain now rush to explain the U.K. to us.
"I have family in America, and dear friends. The country’s fate concerns me. It concerns the whole world! America’s always in your face. We were in France when Obama was elected and people treated us to champagne. For breakfast! Everyone hoped it would mean an end to war. Huh, fat chance.
"It matters to everybody what America does. And from the outside the horrors are blatant. It is an obtuse entity, endangering the whole world. Why the hell can’t it learn to know itself?”
I’m not going to criticize Ellmann for writing a character that she is not (this isn’t YA Twitter), but I *am* going to look for all the Britishisms. I’d be interested to know if the ones I find are localizations or if they appear in the US version too. I do know the UK publisher published it first.
In that same interview, there is also this exchange:
“Q: As of this writing, you have one comment on Amazon that says “How the hell is one supposed to read this? My eyes would fall out of my head.” What advice would you offer?
"A: Don’t read it — that sounds pretty awkward. But what’s the big deal, you know, if you’re a real reader? How many books do people read in a year? “Ducks” is equivalent in length to four moderately sized novels. So it takes four weeks, not one. Many people have read it in a week, I hear. For me, it takes a month and a half — but I’m a slow reader.”
Phew! I thought I might be pacing it too quickly by suggesting a 4-week readthrough. But we are all real readers :)
There’s a very boring review with very boring commenters here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entert...
. . . which leads nicely to the final Q&A in that interview:
“Q: Are we dwelling too much on your book’s length and heft?
"A: Yes. The length is a necessary adjunct to what I wanted to get across, and the way I wanted to do that. Conventional narrative techniques and dutiful compression would not have suited this project. It had to be long. I’d prefer to talk about content.
"Can I say that I also suspect it would not be such an issue if I were not female? Men can take liberties; a woman writing a long book is considered audacious, if not outrageous. Our novels, like us, are supposed to be petite. So many male reviewers have complained about this book’s size that I fear male upper body strength may not be all it’s cracked up to be. But come on, guys, it’s just a novel, not 7,000 volumes of Wikipedia.”
The boring review says that "'Ducks' will almost certainly be compared with other monumentally difficult books, such as 'Ulysses'"--and indeed it is, right on the cover of the first UK edition. But "monumentally difficult" is, of course, a matter of taste . . .