The Shipping News
By Annie Proulx
- Release Date: 2008-01-01
- Genre: Classics
Description
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.
Reviews
The Shipping News
5By Doyle DoyleSecond time I’ve read it. Glad I did. Annie Proulx is a wonderful storyteller. That’s why I’ve read all her books.Shipping News
5By writonLoved this book. It has an odd, shorthand style of writing whose economy of words gets straight to the heart of its unusual characters and their actions in this disappearing slice of life from coastal Newfoundland. The characters are memorable and lovable and the story draws you right in from the beginning. Couldn’t put it down. Loved it.Strong and expressive
5By GillyBeanz1Adore the chachters and much to learn from them...buoyancyThe Shipping News
5By ShipschemistAnnie Proulx is a master story teller. She writes with a precision that suggests her lines are crafted with a razor blade.