Don't Underestimate Quoyle!

In 1994 I purchased a copy of The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx to read with a book group sponsored by the local teacher center.  I know that I started to read it because of my annotations in the margins; beyond those, I had no recollection of this novel when I started reading it nine days ago.  Now it has etched its way into my memory.  This novel was awarded the Pulitzer and the National Book Award...well-deserved.

Quoyle is 36 and a "third-rate newspaperman” in a small town when his wife is killed in a car accident while running off with one of her lovers.  Quoyle's aunt suggests returning to the family property in Newfoundland and off they go with his two young daughters, Bunny and Sunshine.  Things do not go well for Quoyle; they fall into place...he takes orders from his aunt, finds a job writing for a local paper - The Gammy Bird, and plods through life.  If I had to find a verb to describe Quoyle for most of the novel, plod would be the verb.

Quoyle was devoted to his cheating wife and loved her when she obviously had no love for him. After moving to Quoyle's Point, he continues to think about his dead wife, Petal, as the love of his life.  I felt great empathy for this man - this great lump of a man pining away for a woman who did not love him.  But as Quoyle plods along - this man who has followed his aunt to one of the most remote coastal villages of Newfoundland - we discover he hates the water and wants nothing to do with boating, and Proulx creates a cast of characters all carrying their own burdens of secrets and pain:

• His aunt, Agnis Hamm, a ship/nautical upholsterer and her female dog named Warren...named for her late lover.
• Tert Card, managing editor of the paper.
• Mr. Jack Buggit, owner who spends most of his time fishing.
• Mrs. Buggit, his wife.
• Nutbeem, Billy Pretty...both "characters" who work at the paper.
• Wavey Prowse and her son Herry.

The list could go on...and on...but I AM trying to keep this to one page.  And the stories of all these characters are bound together with an extended metaphor of nautical knots (and yes, I love this pun).  Proulx credits "the inspiration of Clifford W. Ashley's wonderful 1944 work, The Ashley Book of Knots" in her Acknowledgements.

It is about halfway through the novel in Chapter 24, "Berry Picking," that Quoyle finally makes moves on Wavey.  She tells him how her husband was lost at sea; she thinks of him whenever she walks along the coast.  So much for Quoyle's romantic coast walk moment.  But Quoyle is no longer plodding; in the next chapter, he speaks up at work when Tert has completely changed one of his pieces, and then while walking along the cliffs near his home:

The 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, 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 senses to mirage and illusion.  A rare place.  (209)

  Quoyle suddenly understands the sea...understands the Quoyle homestead as he never has before and as he must to do more than plod along the path he has chosen.

Finally when Wavey is ready for Quoyle, he hesitates, "For Quoyle, who equated misery with love.  All he felt with Wavey was comfort and a modest joy" (304).   once Quoyle had the strength to make a decision, the real darkness was lifted and at the end a sense of catharsis is reached:  "And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery" (337).

This is a novel that I wanted to finish reading but hated to see end.

Proulx, E. Annie. The Shipping News. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1993.