The Shipping News

What a book. It’s easy to see why The Shipping News won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award, along with several other awards. Upon finishing, I added the rest of Annie Proulx’s books to the ever-growing list I plan to read one day.

The Shipping News traces the life of Quoyle, who was “a failure at loneliness, yearned to be gregarious, to know his company was a pleasure to others,” but often fell short. He’s the kind of guy who “never had the right things.”

We meet Quoyle in middle age. Through a chance encounter with soon-to-be friend Partridge, Quoyle takes on a job writing about public works for a newspaper. He’s third-rate at best. The managing editor, Punch, keeps Quoyle in work during the school year and out when students are available. In the interim, Quoyle takes odd jobs.

Quoyle isn’t all bad. “Punch had noticed Quoyle, who spoke little himself, inspired talkers. His only skill in the game of life. His attentive posture, his flattering nods urged waterfalls of opinion, reminiscence, recollection, theorizing, guestimating, exposition, synopsis and explication, juiced the life stories out of strangers.”

While working at the paper, Quoyle meets and marries Petal. She sucks. While Petal gives Quoyle two daughters, Sunshine and Bunny, she doesn’t respect him one bit. Petal openly sleeps around. Quoyle loves her anyway. Then she dies in a car accident with someone she left Quoyle for.

Eventually Punch lets him go for good. Partridge connects Quoyle to an opportunity at a newspaper called The Gammy Bird in Killick-Claw, a fictional, storm-battered town in Newfoundland. Quoyle’s aunt Agnis convinces him to move and take the job for a fresh start. They go together, with Sunshine and Bunny in tow.

Killick-Claw is unforgiving. “Spring starvation showed skully heads, knobbed joints beneath flesh. What desperate work to stay alive, to scrob and claw through hard times. The alchemist sea changed fishermen into wet bones, sent boats to drift among the cod, cast them on the landwash. [Agnis] remembered the stories in old mouths: the father who shot his oldest children and himself that the rest might live on flour scrapings; sealers crouched on a flow awash from their weight until one leaped into the sea; storm journeys to fetch medicines—always the wrong thing and too late for the convulsing hangashore.”

At The Gammy Bird, Quoyle reports to the managing editor, Tert Card. “The devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation.” Quoyle gets two assignments from newspaper owner Jack Buggit. First, he must write an article about a car accident for every issue, regardless of whether there was an accident. The paper keeps an archive of photos for when there aren’t fresh accidents. Second, he must write about the ships that come into and leave the port.

It’s a bad assignment. “Have you noticed Jack’s uncanny sense about assignments? He gives you a beat that plays on your private inner fears. Look at you. Your wife was killed in an auto accident. What does Jack ask you to cover? Car wrecks, to get pictures while the upholstery is still on fire and the blood is still hot.”

Further along in the story, Quoyle takes a risk by writing a longer piece about a ship called Tough Baby. It once belonged to Hitler. His newspaper peers fear he’ll get reamed out. Jack, owner of The Gammy Bird, loves it and wants more. “Thirty-six years old and this was the first time anybody ever said he’d done it right.”

Quoyle eventually takes on the role of managing editor. The stories tug along. “And so it went, stories of cargo ships beset by ice, the Search and Rescue airlift of a sailor crushed in power-operated watertight doors, a stern trawler adrift after an explosion in the engine room, a factory freezer trawler repossessed by the bank, a sailor lost overboard from a scientific survey vessel in rough seas, plane crashes in the harbor, plaques awarded to firemen and beauty queens, assaulting husbands, drowned boys, explorers lost and found, ships that sank in raging seas, a fishing boat hit by an icebreaker, a lottery winner, seizure of illegal moose meat.”

Along the way, Quoyle falls in love with Wavey. Fear keeps romance at bay. Quoyle loves the memory of Petal. Wavey bears the mental scars of the deceased spouse who abused her. When Quoyle first tries to kiss Wavey, it falls to shambles. “Quoyle lay in the heather and stared after her, watching the folds of her blue skirt erased by the gathering distance. The aunt, the children, Wavey. He pressed his groin against the barrens as if he were in union with the earth. His aroused senses imbued the far scene with the sea beyond. All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.”

Yet they find a way through it in the end and marry. “For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible/ Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”

It recalls what Partridge tells Quoyle early in the book: “Everything that counts is for love, Quoyle. It’s the engine of life.” 

Proulx seduced me with pacing, prose and punch. She writes in fragments and punchy sentences. Rarely an obscure word. Seldom a compound sentence. What seems simple is really hard work on Proulx’s part. She told a fantastic story in a way few could have. 

Among my favorite lines:

On Killick-Claw: “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 goddam cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap you can. Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it.”

On Fate: No one could stop the hand of fate. Jesson was born to be drowned. 

On Life: One of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.

On Love: Used to say there was four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Southhearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman. 

While I’ve outlined some of the larger plot points, there’s a lot more to The Shipping News. It’s a dark book, tragic in many ways. I constantly felt for Quoyle and was thankful that much of what passed happens to him and not me. 

One additional touch that I loved is that nearly every chapter opens with an illustration of a knot and a quote from The Ashley Book of Knots. They tied the story together beautifully.