The Shipping News: A Novel

Annie Proulx

Jan 2008 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family.

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.

Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents).

As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.

Ratings and reviews

I’ve been reading this book in my Modern and Contemporary Literature class, and it’s been referenced in other classes as well, namely Canadian Literature class, and it’s been referenced in other classes as well, namely Canadian Literature class. My professor in Mod. Lit. swears by this book. The author won a Pulitzer for it and this book has been used for practically every kind of literary analysis out there. Some conventions are clever: the use of ropes in the beginnings of the chapters and how the particular knots are elaborated in the content of the chapter. But as a whole, I did not understand how this book deserves such acclaim. The story is good enough, but there’s not really a plot. A man moves to Newfoundland with his aunt and his two daughters. I’m sure if I spent more time delving deep into the conventions of the book that I could come up with a great philosophical interpretation on the meaning of the book and the different names (Quoyle, Bunny, Sunshine, Wavey Prowse, Petal Bear ... ), but in this case I’ll agree with my partner when he says that he gets frustrated when people try to pull symbolism and metaphor out of words and themes that just aren’t there. It’s a good read if you can get through it, and maybe worth a second time around. That prompts the question: what makes a book worth reading. There’s a whole movement out right now--at least in the confines of my small Midwestern college: the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer. Men and women all over campus are falling in love with Edward Cullen and the sort. I’ll admit, I have bought the book, and it’s sitting on my desk staring at me. The point of buying the book in the first place was so that it would just drive me mad, or into actually reading The Shipping News, if they don’t already mean the same thing. I’ll read it over break. I’m told I’m not allowed to before then because I “won’t ever want to put it down and do homework.” I bite back comments that suggest how little it takes to distract me from homework, but in truth I abstain. They’re most likely right. Back on topic. My advisor says that for him as a writer, the number one criteria for a good book is that it turns pages. There is a sense of truth in that, but is that it? Twilight I’ve heard certainly turns pages, but The Shipping News requires a little more work. Regardless, The Shipping News is considered one of the “Great American Novels” and Twilight might be seen as a sort of fad, right along the lines of Harry Potter and the Eragon series. Are those considered “good books” because they’re readable?

I couldn't get through it. Terribly bleak for at least the first 100 pages. The author's writing style was off-putting to me. It felt like a chore to read it, so I gave up.

Almost put it down because the start was depressing. Glad I didnt.

About the author

Annie Proulx is the author of eleven books, including the novels The Shipping News and Barkskins, and the story collection Close Range. Her many honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and a PEN/Faulkner award. Her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker, was made into an Academy Award–winning film. Fen, Bog, and Swamp is her second work of nonfiction. She lives in New Hampshire.