The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

These waters, thought Quoyle, haunted by lost ships, fishermen, explorers 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, sleek 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 sense to mirage and illusion.  A rare place.

On the other side of the island of Newfoundland from Witless Bay, far up the Great Northern Peninsula, where you can look out at the shores of remote Labrador, and past the very tip of the area known as Iceberg Alley, there's the town of St. Anthony, a couple thousand strong.  This is the place that becomes, in Annie Proulx's novel The Shipping News, the town of Killick-Claw.  A killick is a kind of anchor, and a claw is a claw: it's this town that finally anchors the hapless protagonist Quoyle, and roots him claw-like to the place of his ancestors.  Of course, The Shipping News is the first novel you might think of, if you're an American at least, when you think of Newfoundland, and on our trip we each brought our own copy like the tourists we are:

The novel begins when Quoyle's wife, the horrible and absurdly named Petal Bear, is killed in a car accident, leaving him alone with his equally absurdly named daughters, Bunny and Sunshine.  At about the same time, his aging parents kill themselves in a suicide pact.  This draws his aunt Agnis back into his life, who suggests that they leave dreary upstate New York for Newfoundland and Killick-Claw, where the Quoyles lived before moving to America.  In Newfoundland Quoyle gets a job at a local paper, The Gammy Bird.  His duties there ply his deepest fears: although he's terrified of water, he does the shipping news (hey--that's the name of the book), and on top of that, he's tasked with writing up local car wrecks, which stokes the trauma of Petal's death.

The arc of the novel is easily anticipated.  In Newfoundland, Quoyle finds the home he never had, and a community where he had none before.  Visiting Newfoundland, you can see why it's the right setting for a book like this one.  Its geography, all fingers and fjords, naturally creates hundreds of small and self-sufficient communities; even the smallest towns feel like real places in a way that isn't possible, say, on the prairie.  The Shipping News deals in that comforting myth of home, the notion that, if you can just return to the place you once drifted away from, your life will fall into meaning and order.  (Of course, before Newfoundland, the Quoyles came from Ireland, and before Ireland, who knows, but those details have to be elided for these kinds of stories to make sense.)  It's a story as old as The Odyssey, and The Shipping News isn't immune from the kind of sentimentalism that these stories tend toward.  But it also does a little healthy deconstructing of it.  Yes, Quoyle's friend Partridge calls from California to report on the earthquakes and riots, but The Gammy Bird specializes in car wrecks and sex abuse stories.  Home for Quoyle might be hell for someone else.

When I was eighteen, I would have told you this was my favorite novel.  I was really captivated by Proulx's writing, with its outre metaphors and sentence fragments, from the very beginning of the novel:

Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns.

Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence.  Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life, counting on nothing.  he ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds.

I didn't know you could write like that.  The Shipping News, maybe more than any other book, alerted me to the width of ways the English language could be used, and the idea that a sentence could surprise just by the way it's written.  Reading it fifteen years later (yikes), I found the writing a little precious, aligned with the twee character names: Tertius Card, Wavey Prowse, Nutbeem, Benny Fudge.  I have other gripes, chief among them the feeling that Quoyle's love interest, Wavey, is criminally underdeveloped for a novel about a man who learns that love, in the words of the novel's final line, "sometimes occurs without pain or misery."

But honestly, the novel quickly charmed me for a second time.  The people are so vivid, and the love of Newfoundland and its inhabitants warms the novel.  I love reading books in the places they're set, and few have been as rewarding as this one.  It's steeped in local culture in a way I couldn't have fully appreciated before going there, and it's all integrated in a way that feels organic to the story, which is no small feat.  (Small details abound: the paper's gossip column, "Scruncheons," is named for the pork drippings Newfoundlanders put on cod cheeks.)  I hate saying the idea that we have to "root for" fictional people, but you really do root for Quoyle, whose haplessness becomes competence, and for whom love chases out desperation.  The end comes a little too easy, but it's hard to complain, because it's so richly deserved.