The Shipping News: A Novel

By Annie Proulx

Book Overview

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, and "a rare creation, a lyric page-turner" (Chicago... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743225422
• ISBN13: 9780743225427
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Scribner
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.4" x 0.9" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Well, those hours of my precious youth are gone.

A 350 page book that should have been about 150 pages at most. I found the the characters, and the setting of the novel, quite interesting, so naturally I wanted to know what was going to happen. This made the glacially slow movement of the very thin plot disappointing. A man has a bad childhood, followed by a bad marriage. He ends up a widower with two girls, and decides to move to Newfoundland with his aunt. In Newfoundland he fixes up his old family homestead, works as a newspaper columnist, and falls in love with a local woman. The homestead falls into the ocean, his aunt turns out to have had as difficult a childhood as he did, and he marries the local woman. All of this action is worthy of a short story of perhaps 30 to 50 pages. There are sparks of great promise in this book. The atmosphere and complex history of that little town in Newfoundland are so intense that you can feel the ice and smell the fishy north Atlantic air while you're reading it. The characters are real people, with flaws and fears and moments of brilliance. The use of knots in the narrative is beautiful. These factors, if combined with a beefier narrative, would justify expanding the piece into a novel. But Ms. Proulx is not interested in the plot. She is interested in showing off her "poetic" chops ("Quoyle pierced the crust with an aluminum implement," "furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens," "Quoyle laughed like a dog in the back of a pickup") and shoving needless, endless, senseless metaphors into the writing. She indulges this nonsense for easily half of the novel, multiple times per page, constantly pushing the exasperated reader back out of the story. It was grim determination, just guts and style, that allowed me to finish the thing. In short, this is a book you'd read in order to marvel over the style of the author's writing, not a book you'd read for entertainment or to provoke thought. I personally find books of this sort tedious, and authors of this sort pretentious. I do not marvel at Ms. Proulx' writing, at least not in a positive way, and will not be reading anything else she's written. For me, life is just too short to bother with her.

The Magnificent Annie Proulx

The Shipping News caught my eye and I bought it when first published. I could not put it down. Great story, incredible writing skills by a genius and I have bought and read every single book written by the absolute best. Brokeback Mountain is a short story. 80 pages. And the film of beautiful sensibilities was created. Read Annie Proux

Worthy of its Pulitzer

It's hard to describe this novel. You can give a very vanilla summary on paper about a man named Quoyle who leaves his upstate New York life after his father's death, blah blah blah but that wouldn't take into account Proulx's very unique, at times perplexing, writing style (it's only perplexing until you receive little clues along the way that better explain the characters and situations), the odd names for the characters that are all nouns and adjectives, the cold locations and the fact that Proulx does nothing to make Newfoundland sound like a nice, cozy place when so many other writers, given the chance, may have tried to make it sound like Mayberry on the North Atlantic. You can take it or leave it, the island won't really miss you if you don't visit. Those readers expecting a nice little travelogue about life in Newfoundland should look elsewhere: "The Shipping News" fully depicts the tough life that people experience on that great expanse of rock, not sparing us from tales of abuse and incest. But Proulx also shows how people in those same small communities do come together when needed and that the bonds of friendship are at times stronger than the bloodlines of family. For those who only know Proulx from "Brokeback Mountain", this book will further acquaint them with her unique writing style and depictions of the "have nots" of society. Once you are deep enough into Quoyle's story, the pages fly by and I finished this book wishing it had been even longer. A one of a kind read.

A Sense of Place and People

I just finished this--one of those novels to which I've been meaning to get to for about five years now. The story of a man named Quoyle, forced by circumstance to return to his ancestral land, writing for a small local paper...Trying to fit back in, as no outsider would be able to, learning the language of boats, local cuisine (squidburgers?!?), superstition and journalism. I really, really liked this book. A distinct narrative voice, a complex plot-matrix (nothing so simple as a plot-line), and the whole thing well and truly anchored in a place. A concrete and vivid depiction of a Newfoundland seaside town. And the quotations beginning each chapter were nice, too, mostly from The Ashley Book of Knots, with directions for tying--and by chapter's end, I picked up each knot's metaphor. I'd read Annie Proulx's short story collection, Heartsongs, and enjoyed that, too. I don't know why it took me so long to get around to this really fine novel.

The novel that got me to read fiction again

I started reading fiction again after reading The Shipping News. It was so good that I wanted to find more contemporary fiction of this caliber.The novel's a main character is a loser who is hard to love because he is so unbelievably inept and knows it. The background is maritime Canada with all the romance of the sea and of small town life. Proulx studs the landscape with some grotesque characters and others who are extremely real. The writing is sharp as a razor; a single word used in one chapter had me astonished at how apt it was, creating an entire (sordid) scene with a single syllable. The theme of the book is redemption and learning; the main characters learn and change. This is what makes this book worth reading. Without it, the bad stuff would have remainded the type of thing you'd hear about on daytime TV. Instead, it becomes a journey from night into daylight.

A fine yarn

Let me state at the outset that I am a Newfoundlander. I spent the first 38 years of my life on the island, cursing and loving the fickle weather, the stark landscape and the smothering isolation.Concurrent with life in such a place is a certain xenophobia. Part pride, part fear, it tends to rear its head when someone from "away" decides to tell us about ourselves.Annie Proulx is a "come-from-away", an outsider who came and settled for a time in Newfoundland, then went away and brought forth "The Shipping News". By that time I'd moved off the island, like so many of my fellow Newfoundlanders. I left by choice to pursue a career opportunity, but it was still a wrenching experience. Thousands of others have had no choice but to leave, with the collapse of the fishery and the ensuing economic hardships. For them, leaving Newfoundland is a heart-breaking decision, because their loyalty to family and to the place is as fierce as a November gale.A few years after I heard about a curious new novel written by an American and set in Newfoundland. So I read it.As Quoyle made his inexorable if apprehensive way to Newfoundland I found myself wondering whether I would recognize Annie Proulx's version of my native province.Not only did I recognize it, I came to know it better. She had found the poetry of the place, the brutal indifference of sea and stone, the soft light and the muffling fog. And the voices of the people.Not a word rang false. "The Shipping News" is rich in atmosphere, populated by people I know. It is a work fine in its observation and true in its telling. It's what Newfoundlanders would call a "fine yarn".

A complete reading experience; in a single word, memorable.

Proulx's The Shipping News is a truly great work of contemporary American fiction and a wonderful example of what a novel ought to be. Real people, harsh truths, a rare imagination and a superb, unusual writing style come together in this novel where the reader is transported to the symbolic Newfoundland. Proulx's metaphors are truly original and add new twists to the reader's imagination. Quoyle is a simple, unlikely hero who, like all the characters in The Shipping News, is compellingly portrayed through his efforts to untie tight, old, painful knots and replace them with new bonds of joy. We are reminded of the value of every human life, regardless of how apparently simple it may be. Ultimately we remember that happiness is the truest success and there is a Newfoundland for everybody where one can forgive, heal, discover joy and really live. Packed with insight, emotion, truth, symbolism and imagery, The Shipping News will open new doors, be a cause both for reflection and sheer enjoyment; there is something new to think about on almost every page. Proulx offers a complete reading experience that is in a single word, memorable