Who is popular today?

From the detonation of the domestic in Ducks, Newburyport to Don Quixote’s reincarnation in Quichotte, this year’s finalists revealed today challenge our assumptions
In an accelerated age, the best response is to take your time. There is no choice with Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann’s 1,000-page plus novel, shortlisted on Tuesday for the 2019 Booker prize. A bewildering feat of simultaneous compression and expansion, it takes us into the mind of an Ohio housewife as her thoughts run wild – from the state of the nation to the minutiae of daily life. Its narrative occupies a mere eight sentences. Among many other things, it is a rebuke to the consistent downgrading of the “domestic” in literature, so frequently ascribed to female writers, because it insists that our consciousness does not exist in neat compartments marked personal, social, familial, political. Our heads, instead, are a riot.
What does the inclusion of Ducks, Newburyport tell us about the judges’ tastes, judgments and priorities in assembling this year’s shortlist? Perhaps foremost, that they are unafraid of issuing a challenge to readers not to make assumptions about novels based on thumbnail sketches like the one above (Ducks is a hoot, as it were, not a slog.) That they are concerned with writers concerned with foregrounding women’s voices: joining Ellmann on the list are Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, her reprise of the world of The Handmaid’s Tale; Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, the story of 12 black British women, told in Evaristo’s trademark multi-vocal, poetic style; and Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, whose title refers to the final moments of brain activity experienced by an Istanbul sex worker after a fatal assault. Continue reading...