Unfinished Book Review: Ducks Newburyport
I am the perfect reader of Ducks, Newburyport. During early childhood I lived in Newburyport and fed the ducks. Back then, feeding the ducks wasn’t thought of as an environmental mistake. It was an activity kids did, gleefully breaking up white bread full of refined ingredients, mashing the soft crustless middles of squishy slices, eating some ourselves, crumbling the stale ends, saved for the purpose. The ducks of Newburyport, and elsewhere, were happy, the kids of the era were happy, all innocent of the consequences of such unhealthy sustenance for the ducks.
Newburyport is my father’s hometown, though since I didn’t finish the book, maybe she’s talking about a different Newburyport or for that matter different ducks, but anyway, maybe the place in the title is possibly my first hometown, which sounds redundant, but what with one thing and another, there is no town that for me constitutes a hometown, at least not in the way that people seem to mean it, not that I’m complaining or bragging (unlike noting that I get the literary allusion in the title, which is a kind of bragging), and not that it has to do in any obvious way with Ducks, Newburyport, but in our geographically unmoored world, which I realize sounds negative, but it isn’t fully so and anyway how could I, a person not only without a hometown but also without any dramatic story about immigration or even moving to exciting places—I’ve lived nowhere that would be considered by anyone interesting, unless you count staying somewhere for weeks or months living there, which I don’t, though this may say more about me than I realize, this requirement that I seem to have that living somewhere must mean actually living there, not studying there or teaching for a while from a hotel room where I rinsed my clothes in the sink there, or a piece with this sense that to have a hometown must mean really being from somewhere in a way that is largely outdated—though I’m married to an immigrant from a different country, a different continent even, from somewhere else always, in a much more significant way, but there it is, and here we are, neither of us from anywhere, a contemporary couple from nowhere, but amazingly and appropriately,we live in Ohio (duller and more everyday than Newburyport today, but Newburyport wasn’t like that when I lived there), and living in Ohio is the second fact that makes me the ideal audience for Ducks Newburyport, whose narrator is at least in Ohio, probably her hometown is even in Ohio, if she has one.
The third fact that makes me the perfect reader for Ducks, Newburyport is my recently demonstrated appreciation for long sentences. This massive book is essentially one interminable steam of consciousness sentence.
The fourth fact that makes me the perfect audience for Ducks, Newburyport is that I, like the aforementioned Ohio narrator, am a mother overwhelmed by the chaos of motherhood.
The fifth fact is that, I, again like the aforementioned Ohio narrator, am a person filled with thoughts and observations about the world around me. And that is why I am unlikely to be finishing this book any time soon. I spent, according to my app, 33 minutes reading, and it felt like weeks. I have my own stream of consciousness to manage, and, for the moment, that is enough.
