The Shipping News
A few years ago I dove into Annie Proulx’s multigenerational epic all tied to trees, the wrist-strainer that is Barkskins (2016, previously reviewed here). In doing so I realized I had never read her Pulitzer winner, The Shipping News (1993). So this year I did. I found myself slowly pulled in by an unlikely hero, Quoyle, a gentle giant in a cruel world full of betrayal, disappointment, and heartbreak. The precocious characters multiply as Proulx’s award-winning novel progresses and her hero returns to his family’s ancestral home in Newfoundland. He finds himself in an unlikely Eden, but in time it becomes clear it is the home he has always sought. Ultimately, The Shipping News is a testament to the power of place in great writing as well as the magic of human connection to heal us; Proulx transports her readers to the bitter cold and hard living of Newfoundland where small acts of kindness and community serve as palliatives to the landscape’s harshness.
Somehow, despite the brutal weather and the darkness that clings to so many of its characters, The Shipping News ends in hope. Centered around the a small local newspaper (and its titular column which tracks the news about shipping in and out of their port), this novel assembles a cast of characters who persevere through life’s harshness. They cultivate community and cling to human connection in earnest although nonconventional ways. And yet, Proulx’s novel suggests that their nonconvention (according American mores) is cultural; so much of The Shipping News is a testament to the culture and the determination of its people.
Proulx crafts her novel with the aid of a 1944 publication titled The Ashley Book of Knots by Clifford W. Ashley. In the acknowledgments, she tells readers that she found it at a yard sale for a quarter and without it “this book would have remained just the thread of an idea.” Indeed, her hero’s name, Quoyle, an epigraph to chapter one explains, is the term for a coil of rope. The metaphors of knots and ties that bind wind throughout this novel and add a lovely depth, so very appropriate to the maritime lives witnessed in The Shipping News.
Quoyle is Everyman in his misfit, outsider way. His hero’s journey is a slow burn, but heroic all the same. Despite arriving a lost soul, he finds himself amid the wind-swept, bitterly cold Newfoundland coast. And through him, his adventures and mishaps, Proulx offers readers a life boat of hope in a world that can be devastating and disappointing. This is a novel well worth reading, and one that will leave readers either desperate to visit Newfoundland or firmly fixed in the opinion that they never need go. Either way, The Shipping News will forever frame its reader’s mental image of the place and its people.
Bibliography:
Proulx’s, Annie. The Shipping News. Harper Perennial: 2008.
A Few Great Passages:
“We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.”
“We're all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differences as we grow up.”
“The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her.”
“Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. A row of shining hubcaps on sticks appeared in the front yard of the Burkes’ house. A wedding present from the bride’s father. For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”
