Thankfully negative reviews are somewhat of a rare commodity for me. In the case of The Shipping News, it's difficult to find any positives, simply down to Proulx's writing style which I never could grasp hold of, along with dialogue that annoyed the hell out of me. The star of the show if there was to be one, is Newfoundland itself, the characters I struggled to feel anything for, even in the more moving moments, I am still left though with a mixed reaction. I wondered what Proulx had against relative pronouns and conjunctions. I stumbled over sentences after sentence trying to accommodate myself with it, worst luck, it stayed like this for the entirety.

Down on his luck Journalist Quoyle, with young daughters Bunny and Sunshine in tow, heads to Newfoundland to hopefully reignite his floundering life, leaving New York, and a dead wife behind he travels to stay with his Aunt Agnis in a run down ancestral home right by the sea, it's remote, it's bleak, it's cold. He would take a job writing of the shipping news across the water for a paper called...wait for it...the gammy bird. The other characters in the book also have odd names, there's Wavey Prowse, Tert Card, Beaufield Nutbeem, Diddy Shovel and Alvin Yark, 10/10 for imagination. Becoming acquainted with the locals, Quoyle sutters along in life whilst trying to adapt to his surroundings, all the while weary of his daughters, and the affect it had on their own upbringing.


Proulx does do a wonderful job when describing Newfoundland, this was just about as good as it got for me, and after a promising opening setting the scene, I actually was looking forward in a positive light. However, the prose style is a big sticking point, and the pacing didn't suit me either, which, quite frankly was all over the place. To it's credit, it certainly wasn't dull, the characterisation was pretty good, But apart from Quoyle, aunt, and daughters, I didn't like spending time with any others, had I lived in a trailer, wore a Budweiser cap, and went boating I may have done.
Someone mentioned to me they would rather read of Newfoundland than go there. I disagree, would gladly get out my winter warmers and stand on the rocks staring into the fog, than read this again. As for a Pulitzer prize, the competition was either weak or non-existent.

Not all bad, just not my cup of tea. 2/5.

The Shipping News is a wonderful read. We are introduced to Quoyle and follow him from his life and failed marriage in Mockingburg (!), New York through to his move and settling into Newfoundland with his two daughters, Bunny and Sunshine. There is a nearly Dostoyevski-level of tragedy underpinning the story - sexual assault, perversion, violence - which litters the road Quoyle travels down.

There are a few innovative aspects to the text itself, the names and the grammar. Annie Proulx comes up with some of the most original names I have ever seen (Tert Card! Bunny! Partridge!) and this helps make the text more memorable and fun. The staccato sentence structure where she often drops the subject is a clever way of dropping us into a pseudo-interior dialog inside Quoyle's head. These two features give a unique dynamic to Proulx's writing.

At the beginning of the story, Quoyle reminded me of Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, both physically and in terms of his lack of career, but fortunately for Quoyle, he quickly latches onto a friend, Partridge, and a career in journalism despite a rocky start. "Quoyle didn't recognize news, had no aptitude for detail. He was afraid of all but twelve or fifteen verbs. Had a fatal flair for the false passive." (p. 8).

Like Ignatius or even Augie March (The Adventures of Augie March to a degree, Quoyle is desperately trying to move beyond his limitations: "In a profession that tutored its practitioners in the baseness of human nature, that revealed the corroded nature of civilization, Quoyle constructed a personal illusion of orderly progress. In atmospheres of disintegration and smoking jealousy he imagined rational compromise. (p. 10). Fortunately for him, he is able to surmount the early catastrophe with Petal and reconnect with his somewhat damaged, but still maleable kids and becomes a charming father figure. (Yes, I am skipping some detail here in an effort to avoid spoilers.)

In his migration to the cold, windy north, he brings his aunt (herself full of incredible surprises) who imparts wisdom in little chunks: "As you get older you find out the place where you started out pulls at you stronger and stronger...Probably some atavistic drive to finish up where you started." (p. 30). She is going back, with great courage, to a place where she personally suffered but where she will build herself up again despite her own setbacks.

I wanted to mention that another characteristic of this book that makes it exceptional is the care the author takes to give a credible and poignant backstory to nearly all of the characters. None are mere cardboard cutouts of people. Even the crazy cousin has a moment of lucidity at the end. I found this to really bring me and bind me to the story.

There is a lot of comedy in the novel - on arriving in Killick-Claw, Newfoundland, the scene in the Tickle (!) Motel, Bar & Restaurant was particularly hilarious off of Route 999 (about as far from anywhere as you can imagine!): "Quoyle was the first to take a shower. Discoloured water spouted from a broken tile, seeped under the door and into the carpet. The sprinkler system dribbled as long as the cold faucet was open. His clothes slipped off the toilet and lay in the flood, for the door hooks were torn away. A Bible on a chain near the toilet, loose pages ready to fall. It was not until the next evening that he discovered that he had gone about all day with a page from Leviticus stuck to his back." (p. 55)

Quoyle goes to work for the local paper, the Gammy Bird and his male colleagues are all adorably bizarre. Nutbeem, Tert, and Billy plus his boss Jack - all described with care and humor. The book gets its title from Quoyle's column, The Shipping News, where he is to gather information on comings and goings from the port and which overtime he truly excels at while he gets used to the natural beauty (and unnatural human debris) of the area. Cleaning up around his house:"When he came upon a torn plastic bag he filled it with debris. Tin cans, baby-food jars, a supermarket meat tray, torn paper cajoling the jobless reader...plastic line, the unfurled carboard tube from a roll of toilet paper. Pink tampon inserts.
Behind him a profound sigh, the sigh of someone beyond hope or exasperation. Quoyle turned. A hundred feet away, a glistening back. The Minke whale rose, glided under the milky surface. He stared at the water. Again it appeared, sighed, slipped under. Roiling fog arms flew fifty feet above the sea." (p. 110). Her descriptions of nature are occasionally breathtaking like this one.

In an important passage, Quoyle's colleague Billy gives him a metaphor for the schema for a man's life:"Ar, that? Let's see. Used to say there were four women in every man's heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman." (p. 182). While I have a hard time relating that to my own experience, it definitely correlates directly to Quoyle. The Tall and Quiet Woman is clearly the wonderful Wavey (!) and the story of she and Quoyle is another wonderful highlight to this charming book.

Each chapter begins with a quote, most often from a book of knots - the rope and knots being metaphors that are used throughout the novel. I really liked the last sentence of the story as well which uses this wonderful metaphor: "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 might be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery." (p. 355).

Overall, this book was absolutely deserving of its Pulitzer Prize and made me want to read more work by this gifted author who, incidentally, was not published until she was in her 50s giving the present reviewer hope as yet! And I know I have to still see the movie with Kevin Spacey.

Sad, funny, poignant, bleak, joyful and superb. A worthy Pulitzer Prize winner. Quoyle, Bunny, Sunshine,Aunt,Jack and all the other characters were wonderful to read about. Their quirky eccentricities and the brutality of the weather and landscape of Newfoundland. The long slow love story of Quoyle and Wavey after his nightmare with Petal was uplifting.

Now I need to watch the movie.

This book was a drag to get through. I hated everyone in it. It's because of this book I learned to quit the books I dont like instead of hate-reading all the way through.

Local loser goes back to his roots and finds his identity as a Newfie. Written in a comic fashion but too much of the wit is witless. Proulx tells a homey story of simple folk whose foibles and antics make them absurd. There is little meat in this frozen fairy tale aside from that on the bones of the ponderous plodding protagonist, Quoyle. The Shipping News tries to be a story of pain, love and redemption but the silly slapstick style undercuts this theme. Recommended for those who would like to watch an iceberg melt but would settle for an ice cube.

Annie Proulx exploded onto the literary scene with the publication of her second novel, The Shipping News. It was 1993 and she was 58. No victim of sophomore jinx, The Shipping News gave Annie a double boost: it won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer prize for Fiction - one of just six books picked by both juries, and has subsequently been adapted into a film.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in a mix of small upstate towns, Quoyle is definitely not having the time of his life. Socially inept and not comfortable in his bricklike body, lonesome Quoyle shuffles from occupation to occupation in upstate New York. Marooned in the recession-struck town of Mockinburg, Quoyle tries his hand at journalism - and naively marries a good for nothing bimbo, who gives him two daughters but no love. Petal Bear - all characters in this novel have great names - is a vicious and hateful woman, who however never rises above the plot device necessary to move the story forward. And the story is grim enough - Quoyle finds that his life is falling apart: he has no sense of purpose or belonging. He turns to his aunt, Agnis Hamm, for advice - and it is she who convinces him to leave his miserable life in New York behind, take his daughters and go with her to the home of their ancestors, named after them - to Quoyle's Point, in Newfoundland. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Quoyle chooses The Rock - and so begins the story proper.

Newfoundland is a large island on the eastern coast of Canada, known for its variable maritime weather which can surprise its population on any given day, forcing much of it to grow hard and fight their way through pounding waves and breaking storms. Newfoundland was England's first possession in North America - it became a colony in the early 17th century and remained first a colony and later a dominion of the United Kingdom until 1949, on which year it entered the Canadian Confederation and became the nation's tenth province. Two referendums had to be organized - the first was proven inconclusive, and the second was won by only a slight majority of pro-Confederation voters (52.3% to 47.7%). Since joining the Confederation Newfoundlanders continue to see themselves as a unique group, and have maintained their own culture, cuisine and even a variety of English language.

For generations, cod fishery defined Newfoundland: it was a source of cultural and social identity, as most families were either directly involved in fishery or indirectly connected to it, by earning their livelihood as fish transporters or sellers, worked at fish plants and other fishing related businesses. For centuries Newfoundland fishermen used technology which allowed them to target specific species and ages of fish, map the area of fishing and limit the size of their catch. After Confederation Newfoundland fishermen were introduced to modern technology, such as the sonar and radar, which allowed them to fish deeper than ever and pursue fish on an unprecedented scale and compete with other nations that also fished in the region. However, these advances did irreversible damage to the stock of Northern cod: by fishing on larger areas and deeper scale the cod were depleted at the scale which did not allow the surviving fish to replete the stock fished each year; trawlers also caught an enormous amount of other fish, which although not commercially viable was invaluable to the area's ecosystem and severely disturbed the predator-prey relations among the fish. A significant amount of capelin were caught, on which the cod preyed - further fueling the speed of extinction of the remaining cod stock. In the summer of 1992, the Northern cod biomass - once the largest in the world - fell down to 1% of its previous level; in a dramatic attempt to save the cod the federal government declared a moratorium on cod fishery along the east coast, hoping that the cod population would recover and the fishing industry could be restored. It never did; the damage to Newfoundland's ecosystem was ineradicable, and the cod has not returned to Atlantic Canada. Cod fishery remains closed - it was the largest industrial closure in Canadian history - and over 35,000 fishers and people involved in fishing related businesses found themselves suddenly unemployed. The population of the province decresed by about 60,000, as many families were forced to leave the rock which borne them and hope for a life elsewhere.

It is to this rock that Quoyle comes with his children and aunt, to the post-Confederation but also post-cod Newfoundland, where those who remain try to survive. There he meets Jack Buggit, Tert Card, Beaufield Nutbeem and Bayonet Melville, and others cast away in the small Newfoundland town of Killick-Claw, where Quoyle lands a job for the local paper, The Gammy Bird. Quoyle is to report car wrecks and the shipping news - arrivals and departures of ships into the harbor. Clumsily at first but nonetheless carrying on, Quoyle begins to find his own voice as a reporter, make friends and acquaintainces in the tightly-knit community and begins to find himself in the harshness of Newfoundland's weather, and begins to discover the past of his ancestors, themselves castaways from Newfoundland to New York.
I have never been to Newfoundland, but I felt as if the book transported me there. Although Annie Proulx is an American, she moved to Newfoundland for research and spent time among Newfoundlanders, and wrote a book with a great sense of place (and its weather), populated with interesting and memorable people with great, quirky names. Although the story is a classic one - broken man leaves former life and begins anew - she sells it with her ability to transport the reader to the places she describes, and slowly draws him into her world. Newfoundland comes alive in The Shipping News, with its fog and wind and blocks of ice clinking in the bay, the boats cradled by the waters at one time and violently thrown aside the next; smoke rising from the chimneys, people reading The Gammy Bird and Quoyle's shipping news while sipping their warm drinks, each confronting their own problems, all united by the Rock they live on, loving and hating its rough caress at the same time.

Chapters are introduced with a description of a knot from The Ashley's Book of Knots, serving as an illustration of the themes of the book - Quoyle is a coil of rope; "A Flemish flake is a spiral coil of one layer only. It is made on deck, so that it may be walked on if necessary." Quoyle's first name is never given - he has been walked on all his life, and is like a coil of tangled rope. In Mockinburg he had few friends, and nobody took time to get to know him; Newfoundland is to literally be a place of his new self-discovery, but there everybody knows the Quoyles; Quoyle effectively becomes nothing more than an extension of his long dead family. Throughout the book, Quoyle has to untangle the knots made by others which tightened around him and made him a dangled mess and set free the person that he has inside of himself, and The Shipping News is an admirable story of this one man's struggle to overcome personal defeat and his own shy pursuit of happiness on a harsh Canadian island, where hope swirls in the air even amidst the winter storm.

The book was published in 1993 and won two prestigious awards: the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. I remember reading it then (30 years ago!) and finding it to be quirky and imaginative.

Fast forward to now, 2023. Here's what I'm finding. While the author's metaphors are stunning and original, there are too many of them. There's also much description and mention of inconsequential details - the story can be told in a simpler way. The characters are stylized to be quirky with a capital Q.

I am older now and my reading tastes have changed. I like simpler, non-fussy writing and believable characters. I also enjoy dialogue.

I'm pausing the book now after reading 60 pages. I may return to it.

“The old life was too small to fit anymore.”

I picked up “The Shipping News” recently while I was staying in a house in Nova Scotia that could have easily been the setting for the novel. Perhaps that aided in my enjoyment of the text? One thing it certainly did was reinforce for me how well the author (E. Annie Proulx) captured the setting and atmosphere of Newfoundland. The sense of place in this novel is well done. You feel the environment and Newfoundland in particular.
A criticism of the text is that the style of the writing kept me from fully immersing myself in the story. Proulx’s stylistic flourishes in this book are unique, interesting, and well done. And too much. However, having said that, I readily acknowledge her skill with language. At times, it is stunningly brilliant and original.
I really appreciated, and understood, the protagonist’s difficulty in putting a poisonous person/relationship behind him. It is artfully rendered, not cheap; as such issues can often be presented in lesser hands. Ms. Proulx captures that irony of fondly remembering a demon accurately.
The final paragraph of “The Shipping News” is beautiful. Nothing else to say about it.
A book that has been on my radar a while, now on my library shelf. It might not be for everyone, but it was for me.

This is a story about Quoyle. Quoyle is a man that does not think that much of himself and he thinks people do not think that much of him. He thinks he's stupid, that he always does the wrong thing, that he deserves whatever waste is thrown at him. He goes through life like a welcome home mat.

What I love about the story is Quoyle lets the actions of others define who he is, but he is absolutely nothing like the characters whose opinions he allows to define him. And he never realizes it, which is heart-wrenching, but how most people are. He has a heart as big as California and a life that he is exceptional at. He has a gift for loving people even when they might not really deserve it. His unassuming way kept me turning the pages. The hope that Quoyle's good karma would catch up with him made me read late into the night.

I love Proulx's subtle tone in her writing. Proulx writes like she's just telling an event that may have happened to a neighbor, like she's giving the evening news, but she's sharing a life lesson. She wants the reader to find the treasure she's hidden in her words. I couldn't help but feel that this is storytelling at its original intentions and art form. A story to get through life with. A light to find your way home on a snowy night. A real true to life kind of story. A rarity even; A Pulitzer prize winner. Recommended.

What were the good people of Colombia University thinking when they gave the Pulitzer prize to this book?

Maybe I missed the point. Maybe I wasn't ready to read this. Either way I thought it was terrible.

I read Postcards by Annie Proulx and I loved it.  It was depressing and terrible. It made you feel like you were part of it, and I loved every word of it.  So when I read the reviews and people said The Shipping News was even better than Postcards I got really excited. It was on my to-read list for a few months and then one day, there it was, sitting on the thrift store shelf, and I was so excited. My excitement quickly turned to disappointment as I began to read The Shipping News. And by the end of it, my excitement had turned to full resentment for Ms. Proulx and the people at Colombia University that thought this book of all the books in 1994 deserved to be distinguished and praised.

I won't say much about the story other than it was boring. It's a man who's a little down on his luck and essentially does a hard restart of his life with him and his kids. And it works out great for him so on top of the bitterly disappointing lead-up, the never-ending and pointless sidetracks, and the bland and colorless writing, there was a cheesy happy ending for everyone.

Not at all what I had hoped for. Not at all deserving of the accolades, it has received in my opinion and not at all worth your time as a reader.

4,5 zum Heulen schön, Charaktere in all ihrer Vielschichtigkeit mit so viel Liebe gezeichnet, kleine Einschränkung, als Leser werde ich emotional ganz eng, wirklich knallhart Bei-Fuß geführt, aber fast ohne es zu merken weil ich eh bereitwillig mit ihr gehe.

How do I describe Quoyle or the writing in this book? I don't, you'll have to read it. But I'll try.

Quoyle is a bit of a... not an anti-hero, more like an anti-protagonist. He drifts along and lets life happen to him. After a bit too much of life happens to him, he packs up, joins up with his aunt, and takes his two small daughters from New York to the ancestral home in Newfoundland. And this is where the story really gets good. I frequently skip nature descriptions. I admit it. I much prefer to read about people. But here Newfoundland practically is a character. And Proulx describes nature in ways I have never encountered before. Actually, she describes people in ways I've never encountered before too (a brown feather on dark water ... eyes the color of plastic ... face like a stubbled bun). There are short, stubby sentences. Conjunctions, pronouns, verbs that are not vital are cut. And then, suddenly, a long multi-phrase sentence that chases you down like a sudden northern storm and wraps around you.

The language will perhaps not work for all readers. The use of Newfoundland vernacular might also be a stumbling block. But it works. Does it ever work! The whole place comes to life, and in spite of the excessive depopulation due to death by drowning, or car crash, incarceration for incest, people moving away to get jobs, (how can there be people left in this region at all?) it made me want to visit.

I'm adding the entire Proulx back-catalogue to my TBR. But I'll space them out. The writing style, short sentences and minimal action though it contains, take up a lot of space in my awareness.