Where does one start with “Ducks, Newburyport,” the new novel by Lucy Ellmann, with its single, sinuous sentence tracking a middle-aged Ohio woman’s perambulations of thought? It seems vacuous to dwell on the look of the thing, but, well, look at it: thick as a phonebook, red and blue, with an upside-down duck on the cover. Open the book, which has been short-listed for the Booker Prize, and you are greeted by block upon block of forbidding text. (There are no paragraph breaks.) Each section of the sentence, which runs for about a thousand pages, starts with the phrase “the fact that”: “the fact that I think Frances Borshun likes her new dog better than she likes her first grandchild, the fact that she’s nutty about that dog.” Wordplay, snippets of music, and loopy associations multiply. Every so often, the story of a female mountain lion breaks in, told in crystal-clear, pared-down prose.

In 1976, the critic Edward Mendelson described the “encyclopedic narrative,” his term for a fiction, like “Don Quixote,” that attempts “to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture.” Ellmann, the daughter of the Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, marries this impulse to an experimental, stream-of-consciousness style, much as “Ulysses” did. This means gathering up ephemera alongside abiding truths, in the personal and also the sociopolitical spheres. Here are some of the types of things that the unnamed narrator thinks about: her husband; her ex-husband; her four children; her dreams; a bout of cancer that she survived; school shootings; the collapsing climate; Flint, Michigan; types of cakes; types of sandwiches; taxes; necrotizing fasciitis; “the fact that velvet’s created by warp, and velveteen by weft”; “the fact that Emily Dickinson didn’t know how to tell the time”; the plots of Harrison Ford movies; “the fact that Daddy died before I really got to know him”; rape; the word “hydrangea”; novels she read in college; the massacre of Indians by American settlers; and “the fact that there’s maybe too much emphasis on facts these days, or maybe there are just too many facts.”

Much of the pleasure of this book is the pleasure of learning a puzzle’s rules. We acquaint ourselves with the narrator by noticing which lines from old poems stick in her head and what pop culture she uses as a reference point. Reading her thoughts is like peeking in on a nanny cam: “the fact that the Cuyahoga caught fire in 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948, 1952, and 1969,” the narrator recites, and one surmises that she has just Googled it. When she interrupts herself with “Dog Sees Himself on TV and Freaks Out,” it is as if the headline has popped up on her phone. Even more effective is the way the text circles particular fragments—“ducks, Newburyport,” for example—layering them with meaning as their salience to the story becomes clear. The narrator, who runs a one-woman pie-making business, seems strangely distraught about a soggy batch of lemon-drizzle cakes; later, she recounts how “I watched my mom turn to mush in my arms” after a brain surgery gone awry, and her fixation on texture snaps into place.

Despite these clicks of understanding, the book leaves us to wonder, in a broader sense, what it’s up to. The accreting “the fact that” clauses seem to kick off a philosopher’s claim or a statement of cause and effect. But the setup refuses to deliver, grammatically, and the novel hangs, like the narrator herself, in a fug of unresolved tension. What emerges is almost a joking definition of consciousness: the facts of life exist, in a jumble, and this book is content to perform awareness of them. (Ellmann to Karl Ove Knausgaard: “Hold my beer.”) Verisimilitude is not the goal here: real people don’t verbalize their emotional weather so relentlessly or spin off into constant rhymes and puns. The narrator occasionally corrects herself for clarity, which implies that she realizes that we can hear her. Instead of evoking the felt experience of inner life, Ellmann seems to be creating a stylized braid of conscious and unconscious thought—an artifice that’s aware of its own construction.

Ellmann has long delighted in provocation—“Dot in the Universe,” her novel from 2003, stars a woman with two vaginas. Never before, though, has she paired an avant-garde taunt with such gonzo sweep. As a spin on encyclopedic fiction, “Ducks, Newburyport” checks several of Mendelson’s boxes. It is set “near the immediate present,” in 2017. It deploys more than one narrative style: in addition to the mental muttering, there is, at intervals, that animal fable, about a mountain lioness searching for her cubs. This simple quest story serves as a counterpoint, a vision of female consciousness extricated from the pressure of endless facts. Ellmann’s lion paces the wilderness with unearthly calm. “Everything disappears eventually,” she thinks.

Mendelson, in his essay, also noted the genre’s roots in the epic, arguing that such novels show how “the world’s knowledge is vastly greater than any one person can encompass.” Here is where “Ducks, Newburyport” would beg to differ. Unlike the protagonists of Virginia Woolf and Nicholson Baker (whom she otherwise resembles), Ellmann’s narrator has an unlimited storage capacity. She is at once an everywoman and everything. She dislikes Hillary Clinton but abhors Donald Trump. She finds the police shootings of unarmed black men appalling. But she is also, in her outpouring of data, of a piece with the contemporary churn; her patter sucks in all the anxieties of a late-capitalist empire on a heat-damaged planet. The President looms large (“the fact that I’m glad Mommy and Daddy didn’t live to see as much of Trump’s face as we have had to”); current events impinge with the adrenaline jolt of a push notification.

At the same time, the narrator’s modern neuroses augment more timeless sorrows, such as sick parents and vanished love. Her tendency toward self-censorship—“nine billion pieces of candy corn are sold annually, annals, anal, oh no no no”—is more than comedic fodder; it is the stone that sharpens the rare confession. In certain lights, the narrator seems individuated by sadness and how she flees from it. She grieves the loss of her mother, which “broke me, the shock of it broke me, the fact that I changed overnight.” Beneath her sunniness lies a specific, damaged woman who believes that she is a “failure,” “neglectful, shy, lousy,” that “there is no place for me in this world.”

In this sense, there is restraint, and even intimacy, to the way that the book theorizes about “the moment.” Ellmann captures the pathos of the everyday, how one might use pie crusts and film synopses to dam in pain. She also allows the narrator’s avoidance to suggest a greater amnesia, an American reluctance to face its past and its ongoing brutalities. The narrator lives in a country whose mythic propositions hang in the same limbo as her run-on sentence. Two of the book’s touchstones, the Harrison Ford vehicle “Air Force One” and the frontier romances of Laura Ingalls Wilder, conjure sanitized visions of U.S. history. A terror of real memory stands between the narrator and closure; perhaps, the book implies, the same is true of the United States.