The Shipping News
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 Tribune).
At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman is wrenched violently out of his world when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. 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.
The Shipping News “is charged with sardonic wit—alive, funny, a little threatening: packed with brilliantly original images…and now and then, a sentence that simply takes your breath away” (USA TODAY).
At thirty-six, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman is wrenched violently out of his world when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. 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.
The Shipping News “is charged with sardonic wit—alive, funny, a little threatening: packed with brilliantly original images…and now and then, a sentence that simply takes your breath away” (USA TODAY).
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Community Reviews
This is an engaging, believable story, and one that is well-told. My only real problem with it is Proulx's choice to occasionally leave out the verbs or pronouns from her prose. I understand this as a stylistic choice, but I'm a fan using all the parts of speech we have at our disposal, and I find it frustrating when authors deliberately make their work hard to read in order to have a distinctive "voice".
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