THE GENUINELY REMARKABLE thing about Ducks, Newburyport is not its narrator's amazingly extended sentence but that it is an epic-scale novel about mothers and daughters, the way Ulysses and Infinite Jest are epic-scale novels about fathers and sons (as indicated, I would note, by their shared interest in Hamlet, among other things).
Our narrator is a mother, of course, but she also frequently remembers her own mother (who has a lot in common with Mary Ellmann, the author's mother) and still mourns for her, often mentioning that she has been "broken" since her mother's death. The title of the novel alludes to an early memory of the narrator's mother.
The narrator is mindful and attentive about all four of her children, but is particularly focused on the oldest, Stacy, over the span of the novel.
Stacy, in her mid-teens, is unhappy, angry, and resentful in a number of classic mid-teen ways, even to the extent of running away--one of the narrative's main events. She is only out of the house overnight before she decides to return, and we do not get as much information about her as we do about Stephen Dedalus, Hal Incandenza, or Hamlet, but even so, the question of what is to become of Stacy looms tall.
So when a dramatic life-or-death dramatic confrontation does at last occur...one that, given the sorts of things that happen nowadays, does not even feel particularly contrived...and Stacy rises to the occasion and emphatically demonstrates that she is prepared for adulthood...well...it did my heart good.
Is there another epic of motherhood out there? I'm having a hard time thinking of one.
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