The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx (2001)

This is the first Annie Proulx work I've read..and only did so because it was our book club's selection. I found it to be engrossing, insightful, and interesting. Proulx's writing style was so different that it took me a while to get used to her fragmented sentences and curt, shorthand way of getting her point across. Once I quit 'fighting' her intentionally choppy and unique way with words...I got into the book completely.

Quoyle, the main character, has nothing going for him.....he's beyond ugly: "A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face." p 2. The latter facial feature leaves him with a constant habit of covering his chin with his hand. He's had a miserable life: an overbearing father, a cruel brother (who constantly addresses him as Barfbag and Lardass), eventual suicide of both parents, a series of go-nowhere jobs (newspaper work being the most promising), and no love life. His one bright life light is his friendship with Patridge. However, even that is taken from him when Patridge and his wife move to California. Quoyle had thought his life was going to be better when he met and married (why? for heavens sakes) a nympho, nothing person named Petal Bear. She bears him two daughters, takes off with various men, sells the two children and eventually dies in a car wreck. This leaves Quoyle with some insurance money and two young daughters he barely knows. Quoyle's aunt, Agnis Hamm, has recently suffered the loss of her long time 'significant other', Irene Warren, who has died of cancer. Aunt and nephew, Quoyle, both forlorn and bereaved, team up and, with Quoyle's two young daughters (Bunny and Sunshine) and Agnis' beloved old dog, Warren (named in honor of Irene) take off to 'start anew' in a bleak area of Newfoundland (is that whole place so bleak and miserable? Weather just cold, colder and impossible?). They take up housekeeping in the long-vacant ancestral home...a rambling wreck of a place that, many years before, had been towed across the barren ice fields and lashed with cables to the rocks on bleak, barren, isolated Quoyle's Point. Quoyle (a first name would be helpful) gets a job as a shipping news reporter, which consists of reporting the comings, goings and names of ships, for a local newspaper, the Gammy Bird.

Life proceeds for our newly minted family through a series of interesting and sometimes startling events and people. Quoyle gradually comes to grips with his own depression and feelings of inadequacy. He eventually finds a new love interest in the person of Wavey Prouse a local mystery woman who walks everywhere with her dim witted but much loved child, Herry, always by her side. Life looks even better for our hero when he is promoted to Managing Editor of the Gammy Bird. The book's ending is not so much happy as it is tranquil...in that pain and misery are finally abated for this tormented, though basically good hearted, 'loser' of a hero...Quoyle.

You can't skim through this book. Some vital plot revelations are told in a sentence or two. Agnis' molestation by her own brother (Quoyle's father): Aunt is speaking: "....And don't worry about Bunny (one of Quoyle's daughters). She's still a little girl." Then thinks to herself: "But that had not stopped Guy. She had been Bunny's age the first time." p. 135. We learn much later in the book that Agnis had been pregnant with Guy's child: "Ah, I knows why she don't want to come by. Shamed! She's shamed, knowing what I knows....Come to the old woman with 'er trouble, begged for 'elp. Snivel and bawl. Women's dirty business!....See 'er there in the morning, she wouldn't look up, turned 'er dishy face to the wall. There was something bloody in the basin. 'Well', I says, is it over then?' 'It is', says the old woman...It was 'er brother done it, y'see, that clumsy big Guy Quoyle. Was at 'er from when she was a little maid." p 297. We've also learned, again in only a brief few sentences, that she was raped when she was ice skating alone on a frozen pond: "She was eleven or twelve. Blue knit stockings, her mother's made-over dress. A boiled wool coat, English, tight under the arms, some castoff funneled through the Pentecostal charity....Alone. And a pork bun in her pocket. Looked up and saw he was there. He came onto the ice, unbuttoning his pants, sliding gingerly on the soles of his fishing boots. And although there was no place to go but around and around, although she knew he would get her later if not now, she skated away, evaded his lunging for a long time. Maybe ten minutes. A long time." We are never told the identity of this person...Was it her brother, Guy, or some other local fisherman.

We meet a series of oddly named characters throughout the book: Mrs. Moosup, Tert Card (who is described in Proulx' inimitable style: "His voice querulous in complaint. For the devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation. His middle initial was X. Face like cottage cheese clawed with a fork." p.57), Petal Bear, B. Beaufield Nutbeem, Diddy Shovel and Mrs. Didolote to name just a few. We are introduced to menu items that would only appeal to starving sea creatures: boiled cod, squidburgers, Damper Devils, seal flipper pie, fried bawks (what??), fish hash, and conch curry. The only thing that sounded even remotely edible to me was fried bologna.

There's humor, pathos, spirit, redemption, misery, and elation all woven together by a unique and wonderfully descriptive writing style. Proulx even uses interesting quotations from "The Ashley Book of Knots" along with illustrations to start most of her chapters. Each one having to do with the storyline in that particular chapter.

Good, good book...I haven't seen the movie, but with Kevin Spacey playing the lead it should be a....good, good movie.