The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (1995)

Many years ago, a co-worker/friend of mine (Jeff) highly recommended The Shipping News to me, saying "You'll love it! It's about this depressed guy who winds up in Newfoundland writing about boats. The humour is just like yours, deadpan and dry. You'll really relate to this guy."

I never got around to reading it, although his words did linger in my thoughts when I saw the (to me) rather baffling screen adaptation (with Kevin Spacey, Judi Dench, Julianne Moore, and my favourite Canadian actor, Gordon Pinsent). The film moved me to buy the book, hunker down and read it in a comfy chair while waiting for my son to drop off to sleep (where I do a lot of my reading these days).

Quoyle

The Shipping News concerns Quoyle (whose first name we never learn), an upstate New Yorker full of self-loathing, driven by death, family (his father's sister Agnis Hamm), and lack of a better idea to explore his roots and try to provide for himself and his daughters in Newfoundland. He finds, through his one friend, a job with a small local paper, writing about car wrecks and the news of boats that have arrived or have left the small port in the town of Killick-Claw.

Emotionally scoured and now also uprooted, Quoyle, his daughters and his aunt try to breathe life into their ancestral home chained to the rock on remote Quoyle's point. He finds out a few dark secrets about his family's past, puts down a few roots of his own, and (eventually) sees the possibility of a life free of misery. It is moving writing, in a quiet, wry way. Lessons are learned. Friendships formed. Quoyle, a giant of a man with an underdeveloped sense of self, grows into his body.

Newfoundland

Newfoundland has its own time zone and one of the highest unemployment rates of any province in Canada. Newfoundlanders have the most robust sex lives of all North Americans. On average, about 3 times a week. Quoyle pulls down that average quite a bit, but in other ways seems very much like Newfoundland. They have similar economic prospects (low), and both share a sense of disconnection, separateness. If you want to know more about Newfoundland, you'll see bits and pieces in The Shipping News, about the fisheries, the unemployment, the crazy government schemes, and hints of a dark past including incest, thievery, alcoholism, and worse. Proulx, who divides her time between Vermont and Newfoundland, has obviously spent her share of time in other people's parlours, listening and watching.


Proulx

Metaphors there are a'plenty in The Shipping News. The bleakness of the land echoing Quoyle's interior bleakness. Constant references to tuckamore (balsam fir and spruce growing along the coastlines, stunted and molded by frost and the wind) symbolic of the fierce determination of Newfoundlanders to make a go of it. (To be honest, I had no idea what tuckamore was until I looked it up on google). Proulx is a writer for all the senses, invoking, at times, stunning images of cold, barren lands (but no less beautiful for all their barrenness), and at other times, describing food in terms so lyrical you find yourself getting up and looking in the fridge, longing for some seafood. Proulx's characters converse like you or I might, about roads, snowplowing, stud walls, vinyl siding, transmissions, and these matter-of-fact ruminations on such everyday things serves to draw you into the characters, helping you relate to them, so that when a minor revelation does occur, you feel it all the more intensely, as if it happened to family.

This was my first Proulx book, and it might sound strange, but I'll wait for another recommendation similar to Jeff's before I read another. The Shipping News is a hit with me, but her writing strikes me as the kind that could just as easily miss, if I approach it in the wrong mood.

The Accidental Shipping News

In a way, Quoyle, his Aunt Agnis, and many other colourful characters along the way would not seem out of place mingled with some of Anne Tyler's characters from The Accidental Tourist, although Tyler's writing style is more deliberate and spare, compared to Proulx's messy and instinctual wanderings. Both The Shipping News and The Accidental Tourist concentrate more on relationships than action, and the plots in both move slowly enough so you can rest your coffee on them without worrying about spillage.

Entertainment for time invested

The Shipping News is a book best read when you're in a downswing, a resting state. When you're energetic, Quoyle and his lack of self-esteem might just feel jarring; in a mildly down mood, Quoyle's progression from depressed and worthless to hopeful and reasonably happy could prove uplifting.

Secrets

I've left you a few things to discover when you read The Shipping News, which I suggest you do, at your first opportunity.