The Shipping News

This brilliant work snuck up on me.  About half way through, I realized I was thinking about the book when I wasn't reading it, and couldn't wait to pick it up again.  The novel is an adult coming of age story, centering around Quoyle, a 36 year old wimp of a man with a purposeless miserable life, and his family.  When his loveless nymphomaniac wife leaves him, he decides to pick up and move with his two daughters to his ancestral home in Newfoundland.  But it has other genre elements - a bit of a murder mystery, a bit of a horror story, but really none of these.

Annie Proulx develops such a strong sense of place in this novel, and that's part of why it is so successful.  Newfoundland of Proulx's description is a harsh, hard place:

Later, some knew it as a place that bred malefic spirits.  Spring starvation showed sulky heads, knobbed joints beneath flesh.  What desperate work to stay alive, to scrob and claw through hard times.  The alchemist sea changed fishermen into wet bones, sent boats to drift among the cod, cast them on the landwash.

But it is also a place of family, community, nature at its purest, and human interaction on an elemental level - life and death, heat and cold, wet and dry.  Her use of the knot motif is masterful - each knot that introduces a chapter is a metaphor for the goings on, and slowly the reader begins to see knots - physical and metaphorical - everywhere.

Everything in the house was tatted and doilied in the great art of the place, designs of lace waves and floe ice, whelk shells and sea wrack, the curve of lobster feelers, the round knot of cod-eye, the bristled commas of shrimp and fissured sea caves, white snow on black rock, pinwheeled gulls, the slant of silver rain.  Hard tortured knots encased in picture frames of ancestors and anchors, the Bible was fitted with sheets of ebbing foam, the clock's face peered out like a bride's from a wreath of worked wildflowers.  The knobs of the kitchen dresser sported tassels like a stripper in a bawd house, the kettle handle knitted over in snake-ribs, the easy chairs wore archipelagos of thread and twine flung over the reefs of arms and backs.

Quoyle's transformation is happy without being saccharine.  The characters, at first seemingly only caricatures or types, reinforced by their slightly ridiculous names, grew in depth and reality as the book progressed, and became sympathetic and utterly believable human beings by the end.

I was actually disappointed when this novel was over.  This is one to purchase for my bookshelves, and to recommend to anyone looking for a good read.