Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport consists of 1,020 pages, almost all of them taken up by eight unending stream-of-consciousness sentences detailing the concerns and preoccupations of an unnamed Ohio woman.
She also worries about pies. A mother, a homemaker and a baker, she does all this worrying, fantasising and list-making amid the repetitive work of keeping a family cared for and a household functioning. They all put domesticity at the heart of their world, but view home so very differently from the ways in which it has traditionally been romanticised. There’s more on that in a bit. First, a brief look back. Domestic fiction, she argued, has a tendency to be ignored and marginalised, before periodically being rediscovered with great fanfare. The home has, after all, been one of the novel’s great stages for centuries, particularly for women writers, whose access to the supposedly more consequential arenas of public life (politics, business, even the arts) was constrained. In doing so, they turn the home into a sort of centre of the world.
Aysegul Savas’s The Anthropologists (2024), which follows a young millennial expat couple as they look to buy their first home, finds its drama in apartment-hunting, meals, friendships and the gradual construction of an adult life.
She worries about her four children and her marriage, school shootings and the climate crisis, cancer, money, President Donald Trump, and about living in a “constant state of alarm”. HOME TRUTHS In 2015, writing in Prospect magazine, critic Jane Shilling announced the “new domestic novel”, pointing to books by Karl Ove Knausgard, Elena Ferrante, Rachel Cusk and Colm Toibín. Critics keep assuming that fiction becomes more serious “the further it travels from home”, she noted, only to encounter another generation of writers demonstrating the opposite. First emerging in the 19th century, the tag was used to refer to novels such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, indicating that they “confined” themselves to the home and, as such, occupied a different (read: lower) rung, and sat apart from standard literary fare.
