"Ducks, Newburyport" by Lucy Ellman

Ducks, Newburyport is not for your casual reader. I don't say that in a snooty way, as its text is certainly accessible for a broad audience, but it's the kind of book that screams to be appreciated for its structure; its audacity; its singular, unrelenting voice--rather than its plot. English nerds who love that kind of thing will be rewarded, feeling they've gained something at the end of the 1000-page opus. Everyone else will give up a page or two in.

The story primarily takes place inside the head of a middle-aged mother in Ohio who runs a from-home bakery business. Like the famous chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, it's told in a one-sentence, stream-of-consciousness format, though over multiple days. Like most of us, the narrator's voice runs from the prosaic to the philosophical, the intensely personal to the all-encompassing. She worries about her pies; she worries about her relationship with her children, particularly her oldest child from a previous marriage; she worries about her lack of social skills. She worries about school shooters, about police violence against Black Americans; about Trump's pull on America. She mourns the loss of her mother many years ago; she dwells on her relationships with her father, siblings, friends, and ex-husband. In between she recounts random dreams and walks through the plots of classic books and movies.

The common thread among all of these is worry and recrimination. Ellman expertly captures the constant state of (usually) low-level anxiety and guilt that runs through many mothers. It's not enough to take care of the daily needs of your children; it's not enough to take care of the emotional needs of your children (besides, that will fail); there's also a sense of needing to be on guard at all times. The protagonist worries particularly about shooters, but beyond that is a sense that the world is not safe. That our children will not be okay, and that it's our fault.

The protagonist's state of mind is occasionally interrupted with detailed descriptions of a mountain lion mother seeking to protect her cubs. It's a jolt at first, not only because the style is so different, but because--beyond the commonality as mothers--the stories seem too disparate. As the book progresses the protagonist's and the lion's stories intertwine, but not as much as a reader might expect. Instead, the focus seems to be on the parallel paths of mothers everywhere, the single-minded devotion to children.

Given the grainy "realness" of the novel, the ending is unexpected: a perhaps too-easy story of triumph and happy resolution. Somehow, though, I didn't mind. A lot of our world is shit, and our minds are still going to be stuck in that shit most of the time. So take a success story when it comes.