Lucy Ellmann, _Ducks, Newburyport_ (1)

 IT TOOK ME quite a while to read this--not as long a while as Les Bienveillantes is taking me (eight years and counting) but over a year--and I would not recommend it to everyone, but it is outstanding, an unforgettable novel.

It is quite long, over a thousand pages if you count the index of abbreviations (which you should not skip, as it has a few good jokes), and formally experimental, being for the most part one long unscrolling sentence of what is passing through the consciousness of a middle-aged Ohio woman, mother of four with a home-based baking business. Interspersed among the woman's thoughts is a narrative tracking a mother mountain lion who has been separated from her cubs and is prowling around northern Ohio looking for them. In other words, not for everyone.

Even so--a landmark fiction, an immersion in the life of a character to rival Joyce or Woolf.

Unless I missed it, we never do learn the narrator's name, but we do get to know a great deal else about her. She grew up as the child of two academics in Evanston, Illinois, and New Haven, Connecticut, with a year in England as well. Two siblings, a brother and a sister, for whom she has warm feelings, but who live far away. Her oldest child, teenaged daughter Stacy, is from her first marriage, while the other three, Gillian, Ben, and Jake, are from her much happier second, to Leo, who teaches civil engineering (bridges, mainly) in Philadelphia, which seems like one crazee commute (The narrator always writes "crazee" for "crazy"). She has a graduate degree in history and taught Ohio history at a local community college for a while, but did not like it all that much. She has an intimate familiarity with Jane Austen's novels and Douglas Sirk's films. She has a habit of correcting ambiguous antecedents. She really dislikes Trump (the novel seems to be set in the summer of 2017, just before the total eclipse) and does her best not to say anything about this to Ronny, the MAGA-fan who delivered the feed for her chickens and is just a bit creepy.

And she is just wonderful. She often complains of a leaky memory, but she remembers a great deal, and the richness of the novel lies as much in the detail and presence of what she recalls as it does in her impressions of the passing moments while she bakes, makes deliveries, tends to the kids, deals with a flat tire, reflects on the news.