Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 09 Dec 2018

The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx

Rereading books you especially loved the first time around can be a tense experience – will it still be such a life-enhancing experience as you believed it to be and will it still merit the praise you’ve lavished on it when recommending it to others? So I was delighted to discover that within the space of no more than half a dozen pages, Proulx had once again pulled me into her extraordinary world and didn’t let go until I reached the end.

Like so many brilliant novels, the book has its detractors as well as its fans. Proulx uses a style and punctuation which is idiosyncratic and requires the reader to tune into but for some critics it’s a barrier, an affectation, that simply gets in the way. I’m in the camp that thinks it’s an essential element in the creation of the narrative she wants us to believe in and aids rather than hinders the readers experience.

At the centre of the story is Quoyle, a lumptious, good-natured hulk of a man who is self-conscious of his physical appearance:

“A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf, jutting from the lower face.” 

 He gets lured into a disastrous marriage full of betrayal at the hands of a promiscuous wife who dies in a car crash while with one of her many lovers. The marriage did however produce two children, girls, who Quoyle must look after and, at the same time, keep afloat his precarious bits-and-pieces newspaper reporter job.

With nothing much to keep him in New York he agrees to accompany his Aunt Agnis and return to his old family home on the remote but beautiful Newfoundland coast. He finds a job working on the local newspaper, The Gammy Bird, initially writing up the shipping news – the details of the ins and outs of the boats that use the port. Gradually, Proulx unwraps the community this odd family have come to live in and the extraordinary array of characters who live there and work with him. They are governed by nature and especially the sea and life is precarious – but it’s also intensely lived and febrile. Everyone here is damaged in some way (the local newspaper is constantly packed with stories of sexual abuse) and Quoyle, still struggling to come to terms with his failed marriage, discovers he has found a community he belongs to.

I have no idea how much of Proulx’s Newfoundland and its inhabitants have their roots in reality – for me it really doesn’t matter – but the portrait she paints did cause some Newfoundlanders to object to what they saw as a caricature of their communities:

"I live in Newfoundland and have spent some time up on the coast whose environment and people she 'describes' and I can tell you that book is a bunch of malarky from page one…But one detail in particular made me angry. She has people put a Bible in an outhouse to use for toilet paper. Those people are particularly religious and tidy. The idea that they would use a Bible to wipe their arses with is too insulting to pass. The whole book is full of bullshit 'observations' that make a Newfoundlander's skin crawl. Typical Yank making it up to seem more real."

Which is, of course, to miss the point of fiction completely. Proulx’s world doesn’t have to real, it just has to be true - and the book is true to the rules it creates for itself and to its own key messages.

In the end Quoyle finds love with Wavey, a woman also damaged by infidelity, and both discover that love can be something different to the damaging, burning passions they had in the past. Although you can’t leave your past behind just by moving to another part of the world, if you open yourself to the mysteries of the new location and the people who live there, it is possible to come to terms with who you have been.

This is a rich and brilliantly realised novel that makes you part of the community you’re reading about – it invests you in the stories and in the lives of the characters. You’ll be left with a real sense of having lived some time in this Newfoundland community and in some way witnessed a transformation and a homecoming.

Just superb.

 

Terry Potter

December 2018