Shortly after Ducks, Newburyport was published, I borrowed it from the library. I don’t know what I was thinking, or if I was thinking: the book is 988 pages long and our library has a three-week loan limit. I don’t know how many pages I read, or if I read any, but at the end of the three weeks I returned the tome and forgot about it.
The book came to my attention again at some point last autumn, although I cannot say under what circumstances. If my mind were as unshackled as Lucy Ellmann’s, I could probably write pages and pages of free-flowing thoughts that may or may not have something to do with those circumstances; but a mental chastity belt* is preventing my Middle Age mind from engaging in literary licentiousness. Instead, I can only squeeze out prosaic prose punctuated by periods, commas, and the odd colon and semicolon that I may not be using properly. My analogies may also be faulty. They may not even be analogies.
After Ducks, Newburyport came to my attention again under circumstances that shall remain mysterious, I decided to buy the book as a birthday present for myself and to read one page a day. That puts me on course to finish reading page 988 on Saturday, July 6, 2024.
I was jokingly going to write that I would give you the opening line but that would require me to reproduce the full 988 pages, but in fact there is a more traditional narrative, told from the point of view of a mother bear (that’s not the traditional part), within the stream of consciousness. And the first three pages start with that more traditional narrative. So here is the opening line of Ducks, Newburyport: “When you are all sinew, struggle and solitude, your young—being soft, plump, vulnerable—may remind you of prey.”
That sentence alone could constitute a piece of flash fiction and if Lucy Ellman were me, she would have stopped there and not bothered writing another 987 pages and I could have finished the book on Friday, October 22, 2021. But in addition to an unshackled mind, Lucy Ellman obviously has the determination or passion or addictive personality or whatever it is that shackles a person to their writing and allows them to produce a novel, even one that is 988 pages long. And I feel like there may be many people with unshackled minds but far fewer who also have had the determination or passion or addictive personality or whatever it is that shackles a person to their writing. And this is why, even if I manage to unshackle my mind, I will never, ever be a novelist.
*According to historians, there is no evidence chastity belts existed. Perhaps, then, there is hope for my mind, since it is apparently being held under lock and key by a figment of somebody’s (or the collective) imagination, so perhaps I just need to channel that imagination into my writing and ditch the damn punctuation
