The Shipping News (4th Estate Matchbook Classics) (The Perennial Collection)

by Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx’s highly acclaimed, international bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Quoyle is a hapless, hopeless hack journalist living and working in New York. When his no-good wife is killed in a spectacular road accident, Quoyle heads for the land of his forefathers – the remotest corner of far-flung Newfoundland.

With ‘the aunt’ and his delinquent daughters – Bunny and Sunshine – in tow, Quoyle finds himself part of an unfolding, exhilarating Atlantic drama. ‘The Shipping News’ is an irresistible comedy of human life and possibility.

• ISBN13: 9781857022421
• Publish Date: 1 August 1994 (first published 31 December 1993)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: 4th Estate
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 368
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

I myself am a habit-bound creature, and have a hard time breaking out of my routines. But the rewards of actually scooching outside of your established patterns can be high indeed. And finding the kind of ordinary bravery that it takes to make a change in your circumstances and how powerfully doing so can change you for the better, is what for me was at the heart of Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. Our protagonist, Quoyle (his last name, he's never given a first name), grew up the less-loved son of a cruel father. He's a big man, not particularly attractive nor particularly mentally gifted, and with the kind of aura of pathetic sadness that people seem to avoid almost in fear that it'll be catching.

He ends up working at a newspaper, and then meets and somehow marries Petal, who is lovely but unhinged, and manages to have two daughters with her. She quickly comes to loathe Quoyle, and is constantly and obviously unfaithful. She finally leaves him, but karma comes around fast and she's killed in a car accident almost immediately afterwards, leaving him a despondent widower and single father. Luckily, this is when his father's sister turns up and invites him to join her in returning to the small coastal town she and Quoyle's father grew up in: a place called Killick-Claw in Newfoundland.

Not having any other real options, Quoyle accepts and gets a job covering car crashes and shipping news for the local paper, The Gammy Bird. Over time, he develops real and deep friendships with the other townspeople, and grows closer to a young widow raising a child of her own. These slow developments in Killick-Claw make up both the bulk of the book (the plot is pretty front-loaded) and the meat of the book: Quoyle coming into his own is what it's actually about more than anything else.
This book seems like it should be tailor-made for me: small-town life, lovely prose, character study. But it just never quite clicked, much to my regret. Proulx's writing is fantastic, lovely and evocative without going into purple territory. She builds Quoyle bit by bit, showing you who he is without telling you...Quoyle's constant demonstrations of affection and concern to his daughters makes it clear how deeply important they are to him without Proulx having to spell it out. But I think it was my issues with Petal that torpedoed it for me. Besides her preposterous name (Petal Bear? really?), she couldn't have been more of a two-dimensional character: she is hateful and cruel and it's not enough to have her cheat on him, she has to bring men to their house to do it. It's not enough for her to eventually leave with the girls, she has to sell them to a pornographer (obviously they are recovered). I could believe that the kicked-dog of a man he is in the beginning would continue to love her despite the cheating, but after she tries to sell their kids like that, I can't believe that anyone would so easily forgive and hold on to that relationship as their great love affair. And since his slow process of recovery in a new place constantly references her and their tragic "love", I never could quite buy into it. Just never came together for me the way I wanted it to.

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

The short sentences and protagonist’s name (amongst others) really threw me off for a long while. The short sentences really made it easy to skim over parts and not pick up on the little things. For a long time I thought Wavey was a male but I was oh so wrong. The book was socially awkward all the way through, but you found real passion and feeling in the characters that really helped drive this story.

I do admit the first 120 pages were a struggle, but when everything started to settle and life was trying to become normal, this is when the characters blossomed and the story picked up. Once the story was moving and I was use to the writing style, the book was oddly mesmerizing, and a joy to read; not something I would read normally but I felt like I cared about these characters and wanted to know what would happen next.

I do feel the sentence structure played a big part in this book. The sudden stops and odd pauses all drove this story along. If it wasn’t written so spectacularly, I think this book would have fallen flat on its face.