The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx

First published: 1993

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Regional

Time of plot: Early 1990s

Locale: Mockingbird, New York; Killick-Claw, Newfoundland

Principal Characters

• Quoyle, a pathetic, middle-aged newspaperman and loving father, recently abandoned by his wife
• Agnis Hamm, Quoyle’s aunt, a strong, resourceful woman who moves to Newfoundland with his family
• Bunny, Quoyle’s elder daughter, a nervous and passionate child
• Sunshine, Quoyle’s younger daughter, a sweet and doting child
• Jack Buggit, an avid fisherman and the editor of the Newfoundland newspaper The Gammy Bird
• Petal Bear, Quoyle’s philandering wife, who dies shortly after selling their daughters to a child molester
• Wavey Prowse, Quoyle’s love interest, a widow with a mentally handicapped son

The Story

Quoyle is a thirty-six-year-old man with an ongoing history of mediocrity and failure stemming from his childhood. The awkwardness of Quoyle’s formative years has never ceased, and in adulthood Quoyle continues to suffer torments that result from his low estimate of his own self-worth. His parents, never really loving or proud, commit suicide together after they are both diagnosed with cancer.

Shortly afterward, Quoyle comes home to find that his hateful, hyperphilandering wife Petal Bear has run off with another man and taken their two daughters with her. After selling Bunny and Sunshine to a pedophile, Petal and her lover are killed in a car accident. Fortunately, the girls are rescued and returned to their father without suffering any physical abuse. Quoyle’s aunt, Agnis Hamm, arrives to claim her brother’s ashes and convinces Quoyle to move with her and his girls to her childhood home in Newfoundland.

The employees of The Gammy Bird, the town newspaper in his new home of Killick-Claw, Newfoundland, rival Quoyle’s flippant attitude concerning the news with their absurd brand of reporting. The staff includes Billy Pretty, an old fisherman who writes the Home News page and whose desk resembles a bazaar or flea-market display, and B. Beaufield Nutbeem, a British castaway who washed up in Killick-Claw and stayed. Nutbeem steals stories from the radio and then plagiarizes them for his foreign news section. Tert Card, the devilish managing editor, is notorious for his wildly nonsensical typographical errors.

Jack Buggit, a proud local, avid fisherman, and the founder and editor-in-chief of The Gammy Bird, has an odd set of standards for his newspaper. He considers Card’s errors to be humorous additions, he allows Billy Pretty to publish more than three stories of sexual abuse per week, and he requires a front-page story of a car wreck every week—regardless of whether or not an accident actually occurs. Buggit assigns Quoyle the car wreck section of the paper, along with the task of writing the shipping news, which documents ships that have recently arrived in the harbor. In his introduction to The Gammy Bird, Quoyle is confronted with the major issues that haunt him: his lifelong fear of water, Petal’s death in a car wreck, and his daughters’ close call with a sexual predator.

Despite Quoyle’s bland and uneventful personal history, he is quickly informed by several townspeople of the nature of his ancestors and their legacy in Killick-Claw. A source of both ire and entertainment for the community, the Quoyles were a notoriously uneducated and incestuous band of murderers and pirates. To escape their increasingly religious neighbors in the late 1800s, the Quoyles transported their house across the frozen sea and placed it on the high cliff on what would later become Quoyle’s Point. The family house, still located on the cliff, rocks furiously in the gales of wind that blow off the sea. For many years, it has been anchored to the rock by iron cables.

The house, kept in place by such unnatural means, produces fears of the supernatural: Bunny has hysterics at the sightings of a big, white dog, and a mystery surrounds small knots that Quoyle continually finds throughout the house (placed there by Nolan, the last of the crazy Quoyle bloodline). The family and the home have an even darker past, which Agnis has kept secret all her life: In it, she suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her brother, Quoyle’s father Gus.

Agnis’s return to the family house and her plans to repair its years of neglect begin promisingly enough. However, she soon realizes the power the house holds over her, as painful childhood memories begin to resurface. Unable to stay in a place that represents such grief, Agnis moves to a neighboring town, while Quoyle and his daughters rent an apartment in Killick-Claw. The house’s anchors eventually break in a storm, freeing it to tumble over the cliff onto the rocks below. It takes with it the legacy of the brutal Quoyle clan.

The intrusion of various outside people and forces into Killick-Claw alters the dynamic of the small fishing village. The seemingly normal instance of a quarreling couple (aboard a ship originally made for Hitler) turns into a grisly murder. Tert Card aligns himself with oil tankers and big industry, forsaking the natural world the town once represented. Quoyle becomes the new managing editor of The Gammy Bird, and Jack Buggit drowns and comes back to life at his own wake.

As the details surrounding these unusual events are uncovered, Quoyle finds himself playing a significant role in his new community. As he becomes increasingly comfortable in his skin and begins to value his existence, the women in his life—Bunny, Sunshine, Aunt Hamm, and Wavey Prowse—also work through their own sad and violent pasts. In time, Quoyle and his family come to find peace in the little town and achieve happiness among the eccentric townspeople. In essence, Quoyle’s journey to Newfoundland teaches him, for the first time, “that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”

Bibliography

Flavin, Louise. “Quoyle’s Quest: Knots and Fragments as Tools of Narration in The Shipping News.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40 (1999): 239–47. Print.

Hallock, Steve. "Fiction or Truth." Quill 85.4 (1997): 31–34. Print.

Hunt, Alex, ed. The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism. Lanham: Lexington, 2009. Print.

Hunt, Alex, and Jeffrey Doty. "Proulx's Allusions to Shakespeare's Richard II in The Shipping News." Explicator 70.1 (2012): 1–4. Print.

Polack, Fiona. “Taking the Waters: Abjection and Homecoming in The Shipping News and Death of a River Guide.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 41 (2006): 93–109. Print.

Shuman, R. Baird. "E. Annie Proulx." Critical Survey of Long Fiction. 4th ed. Pasadena: Salem, 2010. Print.

Seiffert, Rachel. “Inarticulacy, Identity, and Silence: Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News.” Textual Practice 16 (2002): 511–25. Print.

Varvogli, Aliki, Annie Proulx’s “The Shipping News”: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002. Print.

Whalen, Tracy. “’Camping’ with Annie Proulx: The Shipping News and Tourist Desire.” Essays on Canadian Writing 82 (2004): 51–70. Print.