SOURCE: Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “The Princess of Tides.” New Republic 210, no. 22 (30 May 1994): 35–37.

[In the following review of The Shipping News, Klinkenborg commends Proulx's descriptive talent, but concludes that the novel lacks emotional depth and resonance.]

There is always, of course, a distinction to be made between a successful writer and the gravy that is ladled over that writer by the literary press. Recently, E. Annie Proulx (pronounced “proo”) has been served up hot. Her first novel, Postcards, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1993—the first time a woman has won that prize. Her second novel, The Shipping News, won the 1993 National Book Award, and it has just been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Proulx herself is a copywriter's dream: a survivor, a jack-of-all-trades, an independent cuss, a backwoods literatus, a fisherperson, a hunter, a woman who writes with the wolves, longhand. When quoted by reporters she sounds a little ursine, and it can be hard to tell—given the gravy—how much of that is the bluntness of a writer caught unaware in the midst of her private life and how much is good staging.

As the press ladles praise upon her, it praises itself, as it always does, for knowing a good thing when it sees one. The articles that have been written about Proulx, who is nearly 60, tend to celebrate the blush of fame, the transforming power of the media gaze, as if Proulx's main achievement were to have lived long enough to warrant attention at last. “These days,” one reporter writes in The Washington Post, “the roughest thing in Proulx's life involves learning the myriad duties of a budding literary celebrity.” Welcome to Valhalla.

You hear a lot of talk about the marketing value of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize (and the Booker Prize, too, which Proulx was deterred from winning by not being British). That kind of talk makes you wonder whether marketing value hasn't become an asset in its own right to the entities behind those prizes, worth protecting for the value it confers on the prizes themselves. The more often the National Book Award spawns a best-seller, the more valuable that sales record makes the National Book Award, and the more important it thus becomes to bestow it upon books that will live up to everyone's expectations so the value of the prize isn't diminished.

“There is no doubt that people like to see their names in print with a little pat of butter attached,” wrote Bernard Darwin, Charles's grandson and a Dickens scholar, and these bookish prizes are as close as the literary establishment comes to the Academy Awards—the night of the living pats of butter. It isn't too cynical, nor is it necessarily a discredit to the talent involved, to believe that the deliberations of literary prize-givers are no more governed by purely artistic considerations than are the profound and inevitable ruminations of voting members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences. I mention this because The Shipping News is an out-and-out crowd-pleaser, a book that will certainly not diminish the commercial value of the National Book Award even as that award (and the Pulitzer Prize) increases this book's sales.

The Shipping News is the story of Quoyle, a lumbering, prognathous ne'er-do-well who finally does do well when he leaves behind his dreary, incommodious life in Mockingburg, New York, and returns to his ancestral country, the coast of Newfoundland, in the company of his young daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, and his quietly efficient, quietly lesbian aunt, Agnis Hamm, a yacht upholsterer. Quoyle is freed from Mockingburg by the death of Petal Bear, his sexually incandescent wife, whose light shone equally upon all men, and by the double suicide of his parents, who left their suicide note—cut off by the beep—on Quoyle's answering machine. In a town called Killick-Claw, Quoyle finds competence and the respect of his neighbors and a good wife. The book's final sentence is this: “And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.” If this were the first sentence of the novel, the reader would know from the start what at first he only suspects: that The Shipping News is a fairy tale, a book that doesn't just happen to turn out happily but that plainly intends to turn out happily all the way, a book that is unstinting, almost, at times, forced, in its good cheer.

In Killick-Claw, Quoyle goes to work for a newspaper called The Gammy Bird, a “forty-four-page tab printed on a thin paper.” Its pages are filled with fake ads, a homemaker's column written by an old fisherman named Billy Pretty, reports of the shipping news and local car wrecks—Quoyle's beat—a scabrous gossip column called “Scruncheons” and a weekly series of articles on local sex abuse cases reported by a marooned Brit named B. Beaufield Nutbeem. “That's what sells this paper,” says the managing editor, a scrofulous man named Tertius Card,

not columns and home hints. Nutbeem's sex stories with names and dates whenever possible. That was Jack's genius, to know people wanted this stuff. Of course every Newf paper does it now, but Gammy Bird was first to give names and grisly details.

“Jack” is Jack Buggit, the paper's owner, a lobster fisherman whose favorite oath is “cockadoodle”—as in “Jesus Cockadoodle Christ”—and to whom Proulx is so obliged that at the end of the novel, when Jack, having drowned, is lying in his coffin, she cannot bear to kill him off:

A roar and screaming. Some stumbled back, some surged forward. Quoyle pushed from the kitchen, saw a knot of arms reaching to help gray Jack back to the present, water dribbling from his mouth with each wrack of his chest. And across the room heard Bunny shout “He woke up!”

A novelist may do with her characters what she will, but in the resurrection of Buggit I found the clearest cause of a reluctance I had been feeling all the way through The Shipping News, the reluctance you feel when someone you scarcely know puts his arm around your shoulder and pushes you toward the door. The Shipping News is the very skillful work of a writer who has given her novel the shape of comedy, given it comic characters with comic names and comical utterances, and who places her characters in comic situations, but who is still uncertain whether the reader will detect that this is comedy. This has less to do with the dark substratum of much that is funny here—sex abuse and the general wrack of lives and the peculiarly personal violence of small-town existence—than it does with the narrator, whose voice is elliptical, often poetic and oddly detached. At times reading The Shipping News is a little like watching a silent film comedy accompanied by the wrong musical score: The Gold Rush with music by Stravinsky. Every now and then incongruous harmonies do occur, but the overall effect is puzzling.

In The Shipping News, as in Postcards, Proulx is a powerfully descriptive writer. She is drawn by landscape and by work, rather than by character, and in this trait she resembles no one so much as Wallace Stegner. Set against the passion with which Proulx sees the natural world, and against the intricacy with which she explains the labors men and women impose upon themselves, her characters seem relatively unadorned, plain people marked by reluctance, although their plainness is exaggerated by the poetic extravagance of the narrator's voice. If you hearken mainly to the narrator's accent and rhythms in Postcards, for instance, you will scarcely feel the tragedy that overwhelms Loyal Blood, the farmboy who accidentally kills his girlfriend and is dislodged by that act into a lifetime of drifting. There is an optimistic amplitude to the narration in Postcards that has been replaced in The Shipping News with an impatient but often beautiful terseness. Here is a moment early in the book, just before Quoyle's parents commit suicide:

It was spring. Sodden ground, smell of earth. The wind beat through twigs, gave off a greenish odor like struck flints. Colts-foot in the ditches; furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens. Slanting rain. Clock hands leapt to pellucid evenings. The sky riffled like cards in a chalk-white hand.

Proulx writes with unending fascination about the sea off Newfoundland. “The ocean twitched like a vast cloth spread over snakes.” “The long horizon, the lunging, clotted sea like a swinging door opening, closing, opening.”

Against that staccato poetry, which never quite fills out syntactically or rhythmically, there come the voices of Newfoundland, like Buggit's, talking about a fishing season full of quotas and allocations. “Einstein couldn't understand it. They've made a fucking cockadoodle mess out of it, those twits in Ottawa who don't know a lumpfish from their own arse.” Or Pretty's, talking about a rock off Quoyle's Point called The Comb. “Twelve points onto that rock. Or used to be. Was named after the old style of brimstone matches. They used to come in combs, all one piece along the bottom, twelve to a comb. You'd break one off. Sulfur stink. They called them stinkers—a comb of stinkers.” Or the harbormaster's, whose name is Diddy Shovel, talking about a storm at sea:

You never hear the wind after that without you remember that banshee moan, remember the watery mountains, crests torn into foam, the poor ship groaning. Bad enough at any time, but this was the deep of winter and the cold was terrible, the ice formed on rail and rigging until vessels was carrying thousands of pounds of ice. The snow drove so hard it was just a roar of white outside these windows. Couldn't see the street below. The sides of the houses to the northwest was plastered a foot thick with snow as hard as steel.

As for Quoyle, he tends to think in headlines: MAN WALKS ACROSS PARKING LOT AT MODERATE PACE, MAN WITH HANGOVER LISTENS TO BOAT-BUILDER PROJECT VARIABLES, REPORTER LICKS EDITOR'S BOOT.

Innumerable are the novels that make the human heart an abstract place, without work, without topography, with only the gravity provided by the emotions and the mind brooding upon them. That is not Proulx's way. She is obsessed by what people know about the worlds they inhabit. In Postcards you learn from Loyal Blood more than you could imagine wanting to know about how to remove human scent from coyote traps or how to find dinosaur tracks. In The Shipping News the subjects are fishing, maritime economy, boat-building, the running of a local newspaper, Canadian politics, yacht upholstery, harbor management and the curious tongue spoken by Newfoundlanders, not to mention knots.

There is a specificity to this world that allays the vague rumblings of Quoyle's heart, still stricken by the worthless Petal Bear, whose last act, before she died, was to sell her daughters to a man in Connecticut. As the novel slides forward, Quoyle is drawn closer and closer to a woman named Wavey Prowse, whom Proulx describes, not unkindly, as “an erasing of the human, female form,” and in the end he marries her. Yet that isn't where the main current of the novel lies. There are other currents—the story of Quoyle's aunt, Hamm, the stories of Bunny and Sunshine, the sagas of the Buggit and Quoyle families, the roiling life of The Gammy Bird. But The Shipping News is really a novel about a man growing into his work, growing into a place he cannot have without the work he does there.

It is Hamm who brings Quoyle back to Killick-Claw:

Fifteen she was when they had moved from Quoyle's Point, 17 when the family left for the States, a drop in the tides of Newfoundlanders away from the outports, islands and hidden coves, rushing like water away from isolation, illiteracy, trousers made of worn upholstery fabric, no teeth, away from contorted thoughts and rough hands, from desperation.

She, too, has been freed to return by death, by the death of her lover, a woman named Warren, after whom she has named her dog. The Aunt's return to Killick-Claw and to Quoyle's Point is a form of defiance. When she was young, she was raped by her brother, Quoyle's father. Her first act upon returning to the house where she was raised is to dump his ashes down the privy. “The thought that she, that his own son and grandchildren, would daily void their bodily wastes on his remains a thing that only she would know.” The sole remaining ancestor on the Point is a crazy old cousin who hexes the house with charms made from knots, knots left lying across thresholds. The cousin tells Quoyle the secret Hamm has carried with her since her childhood. The undoing of that memory—the acknowledging of it—is just one of the redemptive surges that sweep across this novel as it hastens to its end, when all must be redeemed.

The past in this place was hard, hard times, as Pretty says, and the present is the time that will seem hard before long. Every comedy is underpinned with tragedy, and in this comedy the tragedy is everywhere, in the news, down the privy, on the seafloor, in the graveyards. And yet curiously I felt, when I finished The Shipping News, as though the resonance of both the comedy and the tragedy had leaked away. For all the precision of Proulx's writing, for all her “sky the straw-colored ichor that seeps from a wound,” there is, in her ellipses, in her terseness, room for a vacuum to arise.

Reading this novel, I began to think of the ways in which a reader is led, or misled, by a narrator's affections, which are often impossible to conceal. I realized that I could not detect this narrator's affections, besides her love for the play of water and light against the land. In The Shipping News the characters seem limited, not enlarged, by what goes unspoken. Even Quoyle. Despite the evident pleasures of this book, I found myself listening hard for an accumulating echo, looking, in emotional and dramatic terms, for what Proulx calls “the reeling gyroscopic effect of the earth's spin that creates wind and flow of weather, the countering backwashes and eddies of storms.” But I did not hear it or find it or feel it.