The Shipping News by Annie Proulx; narrated by Paul Hecht | 2011; originally published 1993 | Simon & Schuster Audio | Audiobook $ 18.70
At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters all play a part in Quoyle’s struggle to reclaim his life. As three generations of his family cobble up new lives, Quoyle confronts his private demons — and the unpredictable forces of nature and society — and begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.
This is one of the most recent titles on my list for Classics Club, published in the ‘90’s. It won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, though, and had a movie made after it too, so I think it safely counts as a “classic”.
The story is ostensibly about one man’s move to a small town with family connections after a major life upheaval, but I would say that it’s really about recovery from long-term abuse and trauma, and also perhaps more broadly about life in late-20th c. bleak-yet-beautiful Newfoundland. This is another one of those books where the location it is set in is so significant that it becomes almost as much of a character in the story as any of the individual humans are.
The short, choppy prose that makes up most of the narrative took some getting used to. Not a complaint, just a statement about my reading experience. I think this style was meant to evoke the pithy way a lot of news headlines and advertisements are written, as though the main character had gotten so used to thinking in that cadence that it colored his entire way of looking at the world. For contrast, this was accompanied by occasional poetic, highly evocative descriptions of awe-inspiring scenery or gut-punch episodes revisited in memory. Once I got used to this sort of storytelling by way of style, I quite enjoyed it.
After a while, I started to think of this book as nostalgically “cozy”… but I don’t think that’s an entirely accurate description. After all, there’s a lot of non-cozy stuff going on — dismembered corpses, economic and environmental decline, various forms of abuse, intergenerational trauma, that sort of thing. But that’s all interspersed with little domestic details, like what specific dinner a dad is making for his kids and all his worries about patching up the roof and discussions about the capricious weather. I think this book could more accurately be described as a poignantly heavy novel with deceptively cozy vibes.
I think this book is a good choice for anyone who is looking for a really solid work of fiction that has a good blend of those aforementioned cozy vibes and more emotionally impactful elements, particularly for folks who have any kind of attachment to or interest in Newfoundland.
Links:
- Biography of Annie Proulx from the National Book Foundation
- Biography of Annie Proulx from the Library of Congress
- Review at Kirkus
- Review at Publishers Weekly
Publication information: Proulx, Annie. The shipping news. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2011. Audiobook.
Source: Public library, via Hoopla.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
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