Lovely Little Shelf

The Book: The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx

The Story: (From GoodReads) When Quoyle’s 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 and family members all play a part in Quoyle’s struggle to reclaim his life. As Quoyle confronts his private demons — and the unpredictable forces of nature and society — he begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, “The Shipping News” shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.

What I Thought: This book takes place in a grey, dreary, poor place and the characters are, for the most part, grey, dreary poor people. Quoyle tries to be a good guy and do the right thing, but even he is just kind of…. grey. I know that the whole thing was intended to be this way, but I guess what I’m saying is that this could have tipped over into the “way too depressing to read” category really, really quickly.

Annie Proulx snatched this dreary plot right off the edge and turned it into something kind of beautiful.

The thing is, I never particularly warmed to many of the characters. I thought that the setting was beyond sad and I just wanted to bake in the sun after reading for ten minutes. None of that mattered. Annie Proulx took these not-great characters and this not-great setting and wrote the living crap out of it. The description served up here is second to none. I found myself going back and re-reading large chunks of this book just to get the pleasure of taking it all in… and while I never warmed to the characters or the setting, I could see them in my mind like they were real. Her writing was lyrical and descriptive without being sappy and wordy. She took a pretty boring plot (only in my opinion, of course) and made it really bloom. Any reader can appreciate that and I know I did…. and obviously the Pulitzer committee too, because this bad boy won the Pulitzer in 1994 and I can totally see why.

Conclusion: A slow, meandering plot attached to some of the best writing I’ve read in a long time. Not for everyone, but if that is your kind of thing… well, you’ll love this.