Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994, The Shipping News is an enchanting yet unconventional love story of a single father, Quoyle, who returns to a long-lost family home in Newfoundland, along the coast of Canada. He embarks on this journey of self-discovery with his two daughters and Aunt after his failed marriage uproots their lives in upstate New York.
“No, they didn’t have any money, the sea was dangerous and men were lost, but it was a satisfying life in a way people today do not understand. There was a joinery of lives all worked together, smooth in places, or lumpy, but joined. The work and the living you did was the same things, not separated out like today.”
Published in 1993 by American author E. Annie Proulx, who now nears 90 years old, The Shipping News received acclaim shortly after Proulx was the first woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction — for her debut novel, Postcards. In adddition, Proulx is the author of “Brokeback Mountain,” a short story published in The New Yorker magazine that later fanned the flames of cult-classic fame for its 2005 film adaptation of the tragic love story of two cowboys in 1960s Wyoming.
The Shipping News starts off with depictions of the frenetic cruelty of Quoyle’s wife, Petal, who quickly meets her end in a car crash while escaping to Florida with her new lover in hopes of selling the children. Why is it always Florida? Anyway, Quoyle is then left with a hodgepodge family held together by the willpower of his aunt Agnis and two young daughters. Quoyle never goes by a first name, save for the elliptical R.G.; in the same vein, other characters debut in this sprawling novel, including Jack Buggit, the Lazarus-like publisher of the “Gammy Bird” newspaper where Coyle works; Wavey Prowse; Silver Melville (because Moby Dick, duh!); B. Beaufield Nutbeem; and weathered harbormaster Diddy Shovel. Proulx’s Dickensian knack for character-naming and world-building continues on from Postcards, with its protagonist, Loyal Blood, and his family consisting of Mink, Jewelle, Dub, and Mernelle Blood.
Agnis always dreamed of returning to Newfoundland, so in the upheaval of their old life, they set out for a new one in Killick-Claw. Upon this return, Quoyle, who is terrified of both the sea and car crashes, uncovers his ancestral lore while fighting to make a living at a dying local newspaper that, ironically, assigns him to cover car wrecks and the shipping news. He and his family are forced to contend with mother nature’s cruel winters and the harsh waters of the bay below their house, which teeters on the top of a point, literally tied down by wire that whines in the wind.
The entirety of the novel, they fight the old rumor that “ ‘Nothing good ever happened with a Quoyle.’ ”
Proulx so perfectly crafts this novel as to have both the microcosm of the Quoyle family and the macrocosm of the town of Killick-Claw grow and adapt to a changing world alongside one another in solidarity.
Proulx depicts complex themes of identity, legacy, and parenthood throughout The Shipping News that come to the mucky surface in disordered waves of hard truths and encroaching modernization. Quoyle fights and overcomes low self-esteem when thrown into the abyss of single fatherhood in a foreign place that demands action — sink or swim. In a moment of asserting independent thought under a strict newspaper, Quoyle unlocks a part of himself worthy of praise and respect. “Quoyle rolled paper into the typewriter but didn’t type anything. Thirty-six years old and this was the first time anybody ever said he’d done it right.”
The theme of independence pervades the story, first with Agnis’ self-assured nature, followed by Quoyle rising to the occasion to adapt to the harshness of Killick-Claw, from navigating icy roads to learning to drive a boat.
“‘Dad, are we scared?’ said Sunshine. ‘No, honey. It’s an adventure.’ Didn’t want them to grow up timid.” Instead, he and his aunt want the two girls, Sunshine and Bunny, to embrace a tradition of self-reliance and strength, to know they can pave their own way apart from a mother who failed them. In the shadow of that loss, a tall, graceful woman named Wavey Prowse enters the lives of the Quoyles and a hopeful softness returns.
The overall tone of the novel is steeped in the wilderness that surrounds them; both its dangers and its abundance remain front of mind, for, as the seasons change, so, too, do the family duties, traditions, and everyday lives.
“There’s two ways of living here now. There’s the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there’s the new way. Work out, have a job, somebody tell you what to do, commute, your brother’s in South Africa, your mother’s in Regina, buy every goddamn cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap you can. Leave home. Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it.”
As the family evolves, Killick-Claw does too, as industrial fishing trawlers take over the smaller schooners of local fishermen. The old bootstraps mentality typical of smaller, working-class towns founded on the abundance of natural resources and community begins to falter in the face of modernization and industrial incursion.
Proulx so perfectly crafts this novel as to have both the microcosm of the Quoyle family and the macrocosm of the town of Killick-Claw grow and adapt to a changing world alongside one another in solidarity. The voice of the writing is honestly humorous, in a loving way, the way a tough Aunt like Agnis would “tell it like it is.” How else could someone author a line as tongue in cheek as, “The part of Quoyle that was wonderful was, unfortunately, attached to the rest of him.”
Proulx pulls the audience into the lives of a city family trying to make it in a wild seaside town with empathetic yet comical artistry. It makes perfect sense that Proulx also wrote “Brokeback Mountain,” because that story employs a similar regard for human faults, love, and vulnerability.
