Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman (Galley Beggar Press, £14.99)

The fact that this Booker Prize 2019 shortlisted book is 998 pages long followed by a 30-page glossary, the fact that it is for the most part a single sentence made up of the quotidian thoughts of a middle-aged, middle-class, middle-American housewife connected by a repeated phrase, the fact that these thoughts constitute a jumble of family, food, politics, movies, geography, lists, anxieties and repetitions, the fact that you may begin by imagining there is no plot to it and in the flow your eyes may come to glaze over and skip through one page or another to slip heedlessly and habituatedly on, the fact that all nevertheless begins to radiate a spell-binding, bell-clear psychological verisimilitude, the fact that the husband of the protagonist is a science professor and the father of the author was a famed biographer of James Joyce, the fact that the protagonist is an amateur of literature and the work of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy and Anne Tyler wind through her musings, the fact that she attempts what few women have attempted except perhaps Gertrude Stein in The Making of Americans or Virginia Woolf in The Waves, the fact that she lives in a time and culture affected by Jackson Pollock and Brigid Reilly and serial music and post-modernist word-games, the fact that she, like so many contemporaries suffers from data overload to a point where the organised human brain may seem on the verge of exploding and society careening toward forms of dementia, the facts that genius as ever may lodge cheek-by-jowl with mania or madness, and that art is long and life is short, and that communication is essential but experimentalism more than a whimsical dodge, despite Ezra Pound saying that Finnegans Wake could not be justified unless possibly as some new-fangled cure for the clap, does not take away from the probability that this amazing sustained narrative by Lucy Ellmann may be the tour de force of our era, indeed “the great American novel”of now, arguably the greatest by a woman ever, or at the very least a masterpiece.

Into its endless stream are interleaved two dozen passages punctuated and divided into perfectly normal sentences and paragraphs. These tell the story of a mountain lioness, perhaps of the endangered species of Eastern Cougar, who passes through the adventures and agonies of mating, giving birth, caring for her cubs, braving the elements, hunting for meat, avoiding males of her kind and men above all, losing her cubs to some passing do-gooders, searching for them in desperation, causing a crazed-lion scare among humans, hunting through suburbs and highways and urban wastelands, being shot, being captured, being confined in a zoo and then… One must not say: the suspense of what happens is part of Ellmann’s brilliant construct. Through the lioness, too, we come to comprehend her theme, of motherhood, its instincts, its longings and tribulations, whether animal or human. The animal, depicted as vividly from the inside as in a classic tale by Jack London, is her emblem of virtue: one who suffers under and struggles to survive free from the monstrous confusions of a civilisation evidently run amok. Happy accident may help, as the book’s title references. But you’ll have to read it yourself to track down the details of that.

Stoddard Martin is a writer, critic and publisher