Finishing a good book should leave you feeling bereft for a little while, but it’s rare to leave a novel with your brain vibrating at a different frequency. After I finished Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport – a single-sentence stream of consciousness set entirely within the mind of an Ohio housewife – I experienced a comedown. Her unnamed protagonist starts every new thought with “the fact that”, a banal phrase that felt like an exposed secret whenever I spotted it in the wild. Scrolling through examples of the clickbait that litter her thoughts (“Dog Sees Himself On TV And Freaks Out”), absurdist headlines took on a new profundity. When I finished it, I missed her.
It’s one thing to read Ellmann’s 1,030-page novel; it’s another to read it aloud. When tiny press Galley Beggar signed Ducks, Newburyport, they didn’t give much thought to an audiobook, says co-founder Sam Jordison. It still didn’t have an audio publisher when it was nominated for the 2019 Booker prize – but as the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) makes all shortlisted titles available to members of its library, it commissioned US actor Stephanie Ellyne to tackle the challenge.
Ellyne spent almost two months recording the book, and it left a strong impression. As the housewife contemplates violence – historic, domestic, political – she started feeling “more emotional and upset about news coming out of America, the hideous political situation there,” she says. “One thing that was helpful was that I share a lot of those ideas – there’s really troubled times in the States at the moment.”
For 45 hours and 34 minutes, Ellyne reads Ellmann’s text in a calm, bemused voice that recalls Laurie Anderson’s spoken-word work. During recording, she averaged 41 pages per hour, though the work continued away from the microphone. Every night, Ellyne would read and research the following day’s pages, working out how to pronounce the thousands of place names and obscure historical battles in US history. “My engineer and I wondered if some of them were fictional, but sure enough, they’re true,” says Ellyne. “The violence in America – all these shootings – isn’t new.”
The audiobook wasn’t initially intended as a commercial project. But then Red Szell, co-presenter of RNIB’s audiobook podcast Read On, met Ellmann and her husband Todd McEwen at a Booker prize event and got talking. It turned out that McEwen’s mother is blind, so Szell invited them to the recording. “I was a bit apprehensive,” says Ellyne. “The writer might absolutely hate what you’re doing! But fortuitously she and her husband seemed to really like it.”
Ellmann supported finding the audiobook a commercial co-publisher, and WF Howes came on board. It’s one of the longest audiobooks they’ve ever published, says senior acquisitions editor Laura Smith – the average is nine to 12 hours. A 30% year-on-year rise in the popularity of audiobooks (and 40% at Howes specifically) means publishers can take risks on long books and experimental narratives that might not have made it to audio five years ago; the forthcoming 35-hour rendition of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light is currently Audible’s No 1 pre-order. “As with TV, audiobook fans have an appetite for long-form pieces,” says Smith.
Ducks, Newburyport’s heft has become rather mythological. “So many male reviewers have complained about this book’s size that I fear male upper body strength may not be all it’s cracked up to be,” Ellmann told the Independent. But for anyone still daunted, listening might offer a solution, says Smith. “With a digital audiobook you don’t always notice how long a book is, and something that might look experimental on the page sounds totally natural when read aloud.” In a way, she says, Ducks, Newburyport may be perfectly suited to the format. “The idea of listening to someone’s innermost thoughts is intriguing. The further we get into the protagonist’s head, the more powerful the experience becomes. It gives a surreal sense of immediacy, and an intense need to keep listening – to stick with her and find out what happens.”
WF Howes is expecting a good response when the audiobook is released this week. But will anyone attempt it for screen or stage? The rights haven’t been sold yet, says Kirsty McLachlan of David Goodwin Associates, who thinks “it would be a fascinating book to adapt”.
“One of the many things that really matters about Ducks, Newburyport is the way it gives voice and space to that wonderful female narrator,” says Jordison. “And having a middle-aged, struggling woman, living a deep and interesting intellectual life at home in the midwest would be pretty radical for Hollywood.”
He admits that the matter is out of his hands, but is enthusiastic about translating the book to film. “Or,” he says, “even better: a two-billion-part Netflix series detailing every single thought in the narrator’s head.”
• The audiobook of Ducks, Newburyport is published by WF Howes, available through Audible. The novel is published by Galley Beggar (£13.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p for orders over £15.
