The Shipping News
by Annie Proulx
Summary
Quoyle is a large, damp, unhappy man who fails at newspapers in upstate New York and is married to Petal Bear, who despises him and does not conceal it. When she dies in a car crash, having first sold their two small daughters to a stranger, his aunt Agnis gathers the three of them and takes them to the family's ancestral house in Newfoundland, a green place on a rock that has to be lashed down with cables against the wind.
He gets work at the Gammy Bird, a local paper whose editorial policy requires a car wreck photograph on the front page every week whether or not there has been a wreck. He is given the shipping news, a column listing which boats came into the harbour. He is unexpectedly good at it.
That is most of the plot. What the book actually is is Newfoundland: weather, boats, food, gossip, a drowned ancestor, and a community that assesses a newcomer slowly and then decides.
The newsroom is where the comedy lives. Tert Card, who hates the weather and everything else, Nutbeem, who steals sexual assault stories off the shortwave radio, and Jack Buggit, the editor, who drowned once and got better.
Proulx writes in a clipped telegraphic style, frequently dropping verbs and articles, and chapter headings come from a book of knots, each naming the knot the chapter ties. Some readers find the style mannered for fifty pages and then stop noticing it entirely.
Be warned that the opening is grim, with a genuinely horrible marriage and worse things done to the children, and that the book turns steadily warmer from the moment they reach the island. It is around three hundred and forty pages. Best for readers who want somewhere completely specific to go, and a battered man given a second chance without sentimentality.
Historical Context & Significance
The Shipping News won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1993 National Book Award and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. It was Annie Proulx's second novel.
She prepared for it the hard way, making repeated trips to Newfoundland to listen in diners and bars and leaning hard on the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, which is where the book's vocabulary of weather, boats and insult comes from. Chapter epigraphs are drawn from The Ashley Book of Knots.
Lasse Hallström filmed it in 2001 with Kevin Spacey, Judi Dench and Julianne Moore, to reviews that were far cooler than the novel's. Proulx published the story Brokeback Mountain in the New Yorker in 1997; her first novel, Postcards, had already made her the first woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Award.