At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As three generations of his family cobble up new lives, Quoyle confronts his private demons--and the unpredictable forces of nature and society--and begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News shows why E. Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
MY THOUGHTS:
This was the Pulitzer prizewinner of 1994. I grabbed a copy from a free street library, planning to add it to the small pile I intend to read.
Its hero, Quoyle, is a shy and self-conscious social misfit. Taking up far more space with his gauche and ugly self than he'd like to, Quoyle has just been widowed. His villainous wife, Petal, is killed in a car smash as she cheats on him. Meanwhile, his parents have made a successful suicide pact. Poor Quoyle takes off with his two young daughters and his aunt to Newfoundland, the icy cold province of their ancestry.
Quoyle acquires a job as a reporter at The Gammy Bird, a rickety local rag staffed by a couple of rough-as-guts old men. We're told it's 'a tough little paper that looked life right in its shifty, bloodshot eyes.' At the age of 36, Quoyle will be the youngest on the team. The founding editor, Jack Buggit, assigns him the job of reporting car wrecks plus the shipping news. Quoyle will have to list arrivals and departures, and is later assigned to write feature articles about one vessel each week.
Poor Quoyle feels in way over his head, from his grief-triggering reporting role to the prospect of getting around in a boat. What's more, he discovers that he comes from a wild and disreputable bunch of ancestors whose 'filthy blood runs in his veins.' Yet in this daunting new setting, he somehow finds his stride and gains confidence. There might even be a bit of romance in store for bereft Quoyle.
His aunt's words prove true when she says, 'Of course you can do the job. We face up to awful things because we can't go around them or forget them. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.' It's gratifying to see things turn out well for these longsuffering characters, although I can't imagine how Quoyle and his aunt muster so much money to spend on costly expenses like major house repairs, boats and trucks. After all, he works at a modest local newspaper with a piddling staff and she has set herself up as a yacht upholsterer, a niche business if ever there was one. Still, at least they pay lip service to having to watch their expenses.
What strikes me most is the fine line between beauty and ugliness. On my back cover, the Sunday Telegraph calls this book, 'As stark and ruggedly beautiful as the storm-battered coast of Newfoundland itself.' Yet Proulx consistently uses repugnant imagery. How about, 'The bay crawled with whitecaps like maggots seething in a broad wound.' Or, 'The rock was littered with empty crab shells, still wet with rust-coloured body fluids.' It took me no time to realise that reflecting the harsh events of life with the most sordid minutiae of nature is simply Annie Proulx's style, for Quoyle, his aunt, his love interest and even his young daughters all have horrific backstories. Well, if others want to call it beautiful, I won't argue.
She does something similar with characters. I started to notice early on that nobody is ever depicted as nice looking, but written with every wart, wrinkle and blemish mercilessly highlighted, even those their owners would prefer to keep hidden. Quoyle himself is described with, 'features as bunched as kissed fingertips, eyes the colour of plastic, monstrous chin a freakish shelf jutting out from his lower face.' He still manages to win the love of a good young widow. Perhaps compared to everyone else we meet within these pages, Quoyle is actually a Casanova, or at least the handsomest guy to be found.
Ranking this book is a challenge. I really like Quoyle. His mild surprise at finally getting something right after 36 years of being called a screw-up and a failure is heartwarming. I love the chapter in which he sticks up for himself when Tert Card, the second-in-charge under Buggit, attempts to change Quotle's article about the infamous oil rigs. And it's satisfying to see how his earnest and gentle parenting style breaks through the hang-ups his girls presumably inherited from their uncaring mother. Perhaps most of all, it's great when it strikes Quoyle that he can break the mould set by his no-good ancestors. For all that, I never really looked forward to picking this book up to continue the story but felt as if I was forcing myself to do it. And I was puzzled as to why I kept wanting it to finish, when there is such a lot to like.
I've decided all the small talk, coarse joking and lengthy anecdotes tend to drag on a bit. It's the sort of realism we all get such a lot of in our actual lives. I want books to help me escape from that sort of tedium instead of shovelling on more. Maybe Proulx has succeeded in making these in-your-face Newfoundlanders so real that they come across as a bit boring. Or I'm willing to admit that perhaps I'm just one of those people who could never assimilate easily into the Killick-Claw community.
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