The Shipping News

This is the strange story of Quoyle, an insecure misfit who falls madly in love with a woman who doesn't really care about him at all. They have two children before she leaves him, and then dies in a car crash with her lover. Quoyle and the children move with his aunt to a remote coastal community in Newfoundland, where he bumbles his way into competence, self-confidence, and love.

Proulx's writing is amazing. I probably wouldn't have found this story very compelling, except that the writing is so good that it's hard to put this down. The book has a lot of quirky characters, who Proulx vividly draws with just a few sparse strokes. The coastal Newfoundland town, with it's harsh landscape and unforgiving weather, is just as much a show more character as any of the people in the book.

It's also refreshing to read a highly acclaimed feel-good book. It seems like all of the prizewinning literature is really depressing, but this book is ultimately gentle and sweet, despite the harsh landscape. show less

After the death of his wife and near-loss of his two daughters, Quoyle moves his family in with his aunt in Newfoundland to make a new life.

About three-quarters of the way through this novel, I found myself silently pleading with the author not to let anything bad happen to the characters I had come to know. That’s when I realized that I had also come to care about these characters and their lives.

The main character is Quoyle, a big, introverted man who is self-consciously aware of all his faults and failings, and who stumbles his way through life without planning or design. He becomes a newspaperman by happenstance, then falls into a lopsided marriage with a philandering woman who dies in a car accident while in the act of leaving show more him for another man — but not before she gives him two daughters, whom he loves almost painfully. After his wife’s death, Quoyle allows his only relative, whom he refers to as “the aunt,” to persuade him to move to their long-abandoned family home in Newfoundland.

Newfoundland comes across as a bleak, godforsaken place, where drowning accidents and child abuse are commonplace. Storms, winter, unemployment and deep-fried foods plague the people who live there. The house they return to is without electricity or bathrooms, literally bolted to the bare rock. But despite himself, Quoyle makes a home in Newfoundland, and begins to build a life. He lands a job on the local newspaper reporting the shipping news, makes friends and even meets a woman. Through his eyes, we see the good-hearted side of Newfoundland, as well as all the depressing aspects of life there.

Proulx tells her story of a quiet man rebuilding his life with warmth and good humor. One particular scene, of a raucous, drunken party in the trailer of Quoyle’s colleague, made me grimace and laugh out loud at the same time. Even though Proulx never writes a complete sentence when a fragment will do (which I found a little annoying), this novel gathered me in and made me care. By the end, I was heartily rooting for Quoyle to find the happiness he didn’t think he deserved. show less

This is my first Proulx, so I didn't know if the unusual writing style is typical, or specially chosen for this particular story. I hope it's the latter, as it works very well.

Update: I've now read the collection, Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other stories, which I reviewed HERE. Those stories use similar language, but somewhat toned down.

It covers a couple of years (plus some backstory) in the life of thirty-something Quoyle: a big, lonely, awkward and unattractive man, always having or doing the wrong thing. He is a not very successful journalist in New York, who ends up moving, with his young daughters (Bunny and Sunshine) and aunt, to a small, somewhat inbred, community in Newfoundland where the aunt and his late father grew show more up. Somehow Proulx keeps the reader on the fence: he isn't especially lovable, and yet he elicits more sympathy than mockery in this reader.

I think one weakness is that the mother of the girls is too horrible, and the manner of her departure from their lives stretched my credulity somewhat.

LANGUAGE

The narrative style is the first thing to hit. It is very distinctive, continues throughout the book, and could be infuriating, though I didn't find it so. It is telegraphic and observational, reflecting Quoyle's job. There are staccato sentence fragments, and some overworked analogies, some of which are wonderfully vivid, and a few of which are laughably awful. Grammar sticklers may struggle to enjoy this book, but it's their loss - context is all, and in this context, I think it works.

If I were as clever and witty as some of my GR friends (you know who you are), I would have written this review in the style of the book.

Anyway, some typical examples:

This is the entire opening paragraph of a chapter:
"The aunt in her woolen coat when Quoyle came into the motel room. Tin profile with a glass eye. A bundle on the floor under the window. Wrapped in a bed sheet, tied with net twine."

Another whole paragraph:
"Near the window a man listened to a radio. His buttery hair swept behind ears. Eyes pinched close, a mustache. A packet of imported dates on his desk. He stood up to shake Quoyle's hand. Gangled. Plaid bow tie and ratty pullover. The British accent strained through his splayed nose."

Analogies:
* "eyes the color of plastic"
* "the sullen bay rubbed with thumbs of fog"
* "On the horizon icebergs like white prisons. The immense blue fabric of the sea, rumpled and creased."
* "parenthesis around her mouth set like clamps. Impossible to know if she was listening to Nutbeem or flying over the Himalayas"
* "In a way he could not explain she seized his attention; because she seemed sprung from wet stones, the stench of fish and tide."
* "eyes like a thorn bush, stabbing everything at once"
* The ghost of his wife, "Petal's essence riding under his skin like an injected vaccine against the plague of love"
* "Fingernails like the bowls of souvenir spoons." (That's the whole sentence.)

THE TOWN AND COMMUNITY

Aspects of the town and its characters remind me of David Lynch's 1980s TV series "Twin Peaks": strange characters, often with impairments of mind, body or emotions, slightly strange names, odd superstitions, and dark secrets (murder, incest, rape, insurance fraud).

The town of Killick Claw isn't prosperous, and the environment is still harsh, but it's better than when the aunt grew up there: "The forces of fate weakened by unemployment insurance, a flaring hope in offshore oil money."

The Gammy Bird is the local paper, and it's like no other: lots of adverts (many of them fake), deliberate typos and Malapropisms, libelous gossip (including a regular catalogue of sex abuse cases!), shipping news and "we run a front-page photo of a car wreck every week, whether we have a wreck or not". Poor Quoyle is bemused and has the uneasy and familiar feeling "of standing on a playground watching others play games whose rules he didn't know".

THEMES

Knots are the most obvious one. Each chapter opens with a quotation pertinent to what it contains, and many are from Ashley Book of Knots, which Proulx found second-hand, and gave her the inspiration and structure she sought. Knots feature in the plot metaphorically (in terms of being bound or adrift), in a more literal and superstitious sense. Rope can be wound and knotted to make good a wound or separation. We also learn that Quoyle's name means "coil of rope", and I suppose he is pretty tightly coiled for the first half of the book.

Shipping is obvious, too, not just from the title, but because Quoyle ends up writing the eponymous shipping news in the local paper, in a community where everyone needs a boat. Most of the introductory quotes that are not from Ashley Book of Knots are from a Mariner's Dictionary. I confess there were times when the quantity and level of detail slightly exceeded my interest, but I'm glad I stuck with it.

The book is riddled with pain, rejection, estrangement and mentions of abusive relationships (never graphic); many are haunted by ghosts of past events and relationships gone wrong. But although it is sometimes bleak, it is rarely depressing, and sometimes it's funny. Even close and fond relationships often have an element of awkwardness and distance; for instance, Quoyle always refers to "the aunt", rather than "my aunt". Even after living with her for a while, "It came to him he knew nearly nothing of the aunt's life. And hadn't missed the knowledge."

Ultimately, it's at least as much about (re)birth and healing as death and doom. One character slowly realises it may be possible to recover from a broken relationship: "was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once?"

OTHER MISCELLANEOUS QUOTATIONS

* "a failure of normal appearance" - if you can't even achieve that, what hope is there?
* "believed in silent suffering, didn't see that it goaded"
* In a shop, "the man's fingers dropped cold dimes"
* "fog shuddered against their faces"
* "the house was garlanded with wind"
* In such a harsh environment, "The wood, hardened by time and corroding weather, clenched the nails fast"
* "a few torn pieces of early morning cloud the shape and color of salmon fillets" (I think I'd prefer that one without the fish)
* "the woman in the perpetual freeze of sorrow, afloat on the rise and fall of tattered billows"
* a babysitter "doing overtime in a trance of electronic color and simulated life, smoking cigarettes and not wondering. The floor around her strewn with hairless dolls."

From The Ashley Book of Knots:
"To prevent slipping, a knot depends on friction, and to provide friction there must be pressure of some sort." show less

What's It About?
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.

What Did I Think?
I didn't really care for the characters at all. They can best be described as quirky, flawed, and at bottom of the show more "food chain" when it comes to human beings. After a time they do begin to grow on you. This is not a fast read by any means and some of the boating terms completely went over my head. In spite of that I found myself wanting to know how Quoyle would deal with the next challenge life tossed him. What I did immensely enjoy was the author's details of the landscape and the character of the people that inhabited it....something I generally don't pay a great deal of attention to. Anyone looking for just excitement in a book will probably want to skip this one show less

Quoyle is a fat, hulking lump of a man with an odd-shaped head, a chin so large it more or less deforms his face, and a personality to match the disaster of his appearance.

This, then, is one of the protagonists of The Shipping News.

At 36, after his philandering wife Ruby has died in an automobile accident with her current lover, Quoyle’s aunt persuades him to take his two young daughters sunshine and Bunny and move with her back to the family’s origin, Newfoundland, Canada. After an epic journey in survival, Quoyle and his family arrive in Killick-Claw at the family home—a broken-down wreck of a house that will shelter them but just barely; it needs massive repairs. Quoyle snags a job as a newspaper reporter for the local weekly, show more the Gammy Bird. He has two main responsibilities: dredging up stories and photos of bloody auto wrecks for the front page, and getting the list of ships in port from the harbormaster—in other words, reporting the shipping news.

An odd duck himself, Quoyle fits surprisingly well into what is a non-conformist community. His seemingly boring job at The Gammy Bird presents him with an unanticipated opportunity for real creative journalism, which he eagerly pursues. He strikes up unlikely friendships with his coworkers and neighbors. An attractive but reserved widow confuses Quoyle who does not understand, given his single experience, that love is not synonymous with pain. These, then, are the elements of the novel which does not “go” anywhere, really, once Quoyle, his closeted lesbian aunt (whose name we never find out), and his two daughters reach Newfoundland.

From this beginning, Proulx has crafted an unusual novel in which the second protagonist is Newfoundland itself—or rather, its way of life as evidenced through the beliefs, speech, actions, and cuisine of as iconoclastic a bunch of characters as you are likely to meet. Proulx uses language to terrific effect, incorporating idiomatic words and phrases that are usually—but definitely not always—revealed in meaning through the context (sooner or later). Clearly she found the cuisine of Newfoundland fascinating if weird and maybe even slightly repellent, just by the way she inserts local dishes into scenes. For example, breakfast “oatmeal with a side dish of bologna” in the Bawks Nest (and what is a bawk?—we never find out).

“Now who’s having the scallops,” said the waitress holding a white plate heaped with pallid clumps, a mound of rice, a slice of bleached bead.
“That was my idea,’ said the aunt, frowning at her pale food, whispering to Quoyle. “Should have gone to Skipper Will’s for squidburgers.”

This is not the stuff of which tourist guides are made. While there are other examples, my favorite revolting meal remains the oatmeal with a side of bologna. Or maybe fried eggs being smashed into fish hash. Hard to pick my favorite virtual nausea.

One of the wilder aspects of The Shipping News is the reporting done in the Gammy Bird. Its readers evidently are riveted by the weekly accounts of rape, child molestation, and other sexual exploits. There are so many—7-10 per week—that at times it seems as if 50% of the male population of that part of Newfoundland is actively engaged in sexual deviancy for the delight and delectation of the other 50% and the entire female population.

Another way in which Proulx uses language is in short, choppy sentences with oddly jarring juxtaposition of adjectives and nouns. It is extremely effective descriptively, giving startling images, at times, of the harsh landscape. Her use of language takes some adjustment on the part of the reader, but once you become accustomed to the rhythm or lack of it and the unusual thrown-together sentences, it becomes addictive.

Even the names have this jarring quality: Al Catalog, Ed Punch, Billy Pretty, Jack Buggit, Tert Card, Nutbeen and Quoyle himself. They stop you as you read, hold you up, startle you at first, until like the prose itself, they become part of the odd, jarring, harsh landscape of Newfoundland.

Adding to the pleasure of the book are the chapter headings, almost all of which are taken from the Ashley Book of Knots, published in 1944. The diagrams are clever, and you practically itch to get a piece of rope in your hands and try the mesh knot, the mooring hitch, and others. I’m proud to say that I now know the difference between the clove hitch ands two half hitches, and what a bight is.

Quoyle and the unfolding of his personality is a marvelously touching story that is told without a whiff of sentiment. In fact, that can be said of the whole book, and I think is Proulx’s view of Newfoundland and everyone in it, and is a large part of the genius of the book. Because make no mistake, this is a modern American masterpiece. show less

I loved this quirky novel of imperfect people making a place for themselves in an inhospitable place. Full of endearing characters that never really feel inauthentic, the dark humor throughout prevents it from being completely bleak. Quoyle is a wonderfully awkward anti-hero whose love for his children and growing sense of himself and his own possibilities adds a real warmth to the story.

When Quoyle's awful wife is killed in a car accident, he makes a sudden decision to move from New York to Newfoundland with his aunt and two young daughters. Working at a small town newspaper, Quoyle becomes immersed in the oddities of life on the Rock and the idiosyncracies of the people who call it home.

This book was a rough start for me. The writing style did not pull me in at all as Proulx writes the novel of Quoyle's life using the sentence structure that makes up newspaper articles. Streams of short sentences interspersed with endless lists. And Quoyle himself was a protagonist that it took ages to warm to. But in the end the book dug into me and held on; caught me with sad and funny anecdotes of the characters that make up the show more small town in Newfoundland that Proulx creates. A slower read that could easily be dipped in and out of, it may leave deeper impressions in my memory than I would have originally anticipated. show less