Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Anne Proulx's "The Shipping News" is
a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the
contemporary North American family.
Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a
crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed
fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when
his two-timing wife meets her just deserts. An aunt convinces
Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with
her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral
home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle's Point, in a house
empty except for a few mementos of the family's unsavory past, the
battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives.
Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury
rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is
cod cheeks, and it's easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than
on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a
collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a
yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job
reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the "Gammy Bird"
(a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos
of car accidents).
As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles
confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor
triumph--in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel
the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem,
who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt
refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey;
and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the
spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a
pickle jar, and to tie a true lover's knot.
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