In a 2017 essay, Atwood described writing Offred’s story in the tradition of “the literature of witness” — referring to those accounts left by people bearing witness to the calamities of history they’ve experienced firsthand: wars, atrocities, disasters, social upheavals, hinge moments in civilization. It’s a genre that includes the diary of Anne Frank, the writings of Primo Levi, the choral histories assembled by the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich from intensive interviews with Russians, remembering their daily lives during World War II, the Chernobyl accident or the Afghanistan war. Agency and strength, Atwood seems to be suggesting, do not require a heroine with the visionary gifts of Joan of Arc, or the ninja skills of a Katniss Everdeen or Lisbeth Salander — there are other ways of defying tyranny, participating in the resistance or helping ensure the truth of the historical record.
Halfway through my MFA at Columbia University I was put on chemotherapy for the autoimmune disease that I had struggled with for many years. After a long hospitalization over the Christmas break I was still missing workshops. My body was not responding well to the treatment, and it often felt like my stomach was brewing battery acid. I had a piece of paper that said THIS IS NOT A BILL, but the $30,000 in red ink was just as menacing as the real thing. And yet, it wasn’t the illness or the threat of debt that made me worry about returning to my degree. As far as fears go, those were both old friends. No, what worried me was that words had started to gutter in the back alley of my mind. Of the many deprivations that illness has enacted on me, perhaps the most unexpected and the most devastating has been the way that my sense of language dulled almost to the point of disappearing from my life.
“Ducks, Newburyport,” the new novel by Lucy Ellmann, recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, unspools as a 426,100-word sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages — occasionally interrupted by a more traditional story, albeit one from the point of view of a mountain lioness. It seems designed to thwart the timid or lazy reader but shouldn’t. Timid, lazy readers to the front! Ellmann’s unnamed narrator, a mother of four living in Ohio, has a cutting power of observation and a depressive charm. “Being good-looking means you have to try to stay good-looking and that’s stressful,” she says. This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now: toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry.
Truong’s novel is propelled not by action but by the retrospective piecing together that happens once a relationship is over. Spurred by nostalgia, regret, longing and anger, each woman examines her memories. The truth becomes murky as the history of this man they have all loved is subjectively recorded for posterity. As Setsu observes, “to tell another’s story is to bring him to life,” but here it’s the women who achieve that feat rather than the man who connected them.