Amidst all my heavy-weight non-fiction of the last few months, a friend shoved a copy of E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News into my hands. Its sparse prose, Newfoundland dialect, and total immersion into rural Canadian fishing culture was a welcome escape from religious extremism, assimilation, and worldwide (and soon to be universe-wide) hatred of Israel.
Proulx is fond of short sentences—fragments even. She uses this prose style to great effect reflecting the thought-speech of Quoyle, her protagonist in this book, a doughy, unlovable, simple-minded man in his 30s with few talents but a heart of gold. (As he learns the journalism trade, he eventually begins to invent headlines in his own head to describe the events of his life, such as “Man Sounds Like Fatuous Fool” and “Girl Fears White Dog, Relatives Marvelously Upset.”) His choice to leave a ruined life in New York State and move to his family’s place of origin in Newfoundland enables him to begin again—professionally, socially, paternally, and ultimately, romantically. He and his aunt, who makes the move with him, are not the most appealing characters in the novel. Neither are his two young daughters, who are confused and scarred from their own chaotic former life and behave like unkempt savages most of the time. The characters who won my admiration in the novel were the native Newfoundlanders with their tough work ethic, love of the sea, and wry, self-deprecating humor. The protagonist’s social life revolves around the four other men who put out the local newspaper, a collection of gossip, car wrecks, sexual abuse, recipes, foreign news lifted from the radio, and—Quoyle’s feature and the title of the novel—shipping news. The news staff is a cast of sharply-cut characters whose conversations and arguments provide Quoyle (and the reader) with the historical background of the town, the demise of the Newfoundland fishing industry, the many disasters that came with confederation with Canada, and current events in the lives of the townspeople. Quoyle and the reader both come to love the dialect, salty humor, and rugged will to survive that marks the people of this small corner of North America.
The one thing I didn’t like was that it took nearly 150 pages for me to decide I liked the book. The sordid details of the life Quoyle left were difficult to get through, and it was a rough transition in Quoyle’s battered station wagon from his disastrous marriage in New York State to Newfoundland and his wind-battered ancestral home where the family stays temporarily, to where he and his daughters ultimately decide to make their home in the town. Quoyle and his aunt were not characters I could warm to easily, and while that may have been part of Proulx’s point—that sometimes we don’t come to care about people right away, but over time feel at least a grudging sympathy for them—it made me think seriously of putting the book down and finding something more pleasant to read in the early chapters.
I ended up loving the prose, though, and between the wonderful characters and Proulx’s gift for description, I have half a mind to make a trip myself to Newfoundland. Here is Quoyle, contemplating the sea on p. 209:
These waters, thought Quoyle, haunted by lost ships, fishermen, explorer gurgled down into sea holes as black as a dog’s throat. Bawling into salt broth. Vikings down the cracking winds, steering through fog by the polarized light of sun-stones. The Inuit in skin boats, breathing, breathing, rhythmic suck of frigid air, iced paddles dipping, spray freezing, sleep back rising, jostle, the boat torn, spiraling down. Millennial bergs from the glaciers, morbid, silent except for waves breaking on their flanks, the deceiving sound of shoreline where there was no shore. Foghorns, smothered gun reports along the coast. Ice welding land to sea. Frost smoke. Clouds mottled by reflections of water holes in the plains of ice. The glare of ice erasing dimension, distance, subjecting senses to mirage and illusion. A rare place.
Okay, so the place sounds like an icy hell. But a “rare place” indeed.
Shimshonit 
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