Lucy Ellmann, daughter of Richard, is a good and erudite novelist

[Mark Kohut]

O yeah...and a potato salad recipe commented on at length.

On Sun, Oct 20, 2019 at 10:14 AM Mark Kohut (via Google Docs) <
mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> mark.kohut at gmail.com has shared a link to the following document:
> Lucy Ellmann, daughter of Richard, is a good and erudite novelist
> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bzqEc1sA9mHOlGY64RHV-vgALa-1TKC28ijG_vw5DcY/edit?usp=sharing_eil&ts=5dac6bbb>
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> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bzqEc1sA9mHOlGY64RHV-vgALa-1TKC28ijG_vw5DcY/edit?usp=sharing_eip&ts=5dac6bbb>
> Snapshot of the item below:
>
>                   Lucy Ellmann, daughter of Richard, is a good and erudite
> novelist
>
> Lucy Ellmann, daughter of Richard, is a good and erudite novelist. I knew
> and ‘sold’ an earlier novel when in publishing. (I still remember the
> young--assistant or intern--who told me so intelligently and unexpectedly
> why I should read her novel when I went to the Bloomsbury offices for info
> or something.)  Opinionated, outrageously so to some straight-judging book
> establishment types, as witty as Wilde or Joyce (maybe), verbally fearless
> and more.
>
> I am now reading concentratedly her acclaimed, Booker-nominated but not a
> winner, Ducks, Newburyport with great early morning reading pleasure. Not
> since Anniversaries, newly translated, have I had a new novel experience
> to equal it. Original, alive and full of surprises on the page; full of
> feeling, poignance, linguistic wonderfulness,  along with erudition thrown
> off like wisecracks.  (But I've been reading Roth and Shakespeare and
>
> older Atwood so......not many new ones to judge against)
>
> But this post is not just about my reading but offers this supposition:
> Erudite Ellmann might, I say might, be showing Pynchonian influences in
> this work.
>
> (Yes, trust your own reading, not this Pynchon fanboy who sees
>
> too much P everywhere so must watch his own mind's magic projection screen
> .....)
>
> YET, and this is a kind of jump Ms Ellmann does in her novel, and the
> kinds of digressions that are so interesting,
>
> Here is the circumstantial evidence as it finally accumulated in my mind
> after the first hundred plus pages. If not sea-changed influences then
> thematic similarities by another artist within a duck's swim, at least, of
> Pynchon.
>
> Lists: a leitmotif.....some as long as Pynchon's and to a similar purpose:
> to show the density of life, 'things', in a situation. But also, smaller
> lists of mental associations thrown off all the time, a new kind of stream
> of consciousness, willfully mannered to remind us of how we all think....A
> difference in her lists: also simply full of linguistic playfulness,
> perhaps Joyce-like.
>
> Movies and scenes and characters from movies seen and commented on
> Pynchon-like all over the text.
>
> O yes, I must put down here the hook that got this novel so much early
> attention.....it was billed as being told in ONE LONG SENTENCE, Finnegans
> Wake-like although
>
> there are really eight and there are more paragraph breaks that end with
> commas not sentences --too cute---before they continue as usually wholly
> new scenes after the break.
>
> More possible P: Remember what P writes about Columbus, Ohio in Against
> the Day, that sit-upon city paragraph, well the narrator here is a
> housewife living very near to Columbus, and on the obvious level,
> mid-American in much of her observations, the asshole of America so to joke
> Pynchonianly...the mid-America horrors of our time, which is the present.
> From what I can learn, the author herself never lived in Ohio, other places
> where she did live occur in her telling of her past.
>
> Then there is a page riff on what bombing Ohio would be like, waiting for
> those bombs to land on your home, in your home, etc....
>
> Not P but West: a man without a nose, with a hole as his nose,  is riffed
> upon by the author-- supposedly seen in NYC.
>
> There is human poignance reminiscent to me---remember, your mileage may
> vary---of Mucho Maas' stuff in the old car as another leitmotif
> throughout....she presents that humanity via residue the same small list
> way.....
>
> And she repeats so..movingly, so you get the theme the reason, the meaning
> of the ‘symbolic form”. Life is leap and recoil…..life is an
> embarrassment...and lemon drizzle cake among much else…
>
> I also love the way she writes out her “facts’....the fact is...anchors
> reality for us around all the playfulness and non-literal imaginings...
>
> And I think there was something else, but later if I recover it....
>
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