There’s a breathless scene of near-tragedy in the first third of The Shipping News that will wrench anyone who’s ever been caretaker of anyone else. It’s just one of countless more-or-less peripheral tragedies that strike glancing blows throughout the book, a novel largely set in the maritime roughs of Newfoundland, where tragedy comes like seal-flipper pie: dark, oily testament to the power of the wilds.
Yet it’s Annie Proulx’s descriptive horsepower that marks the novel more than anything else for me. Flip to any page and you’ll find her painting scenery and characters in achingly lovely prose with a cream-top of mischief or foreboding, a skill that can turn a character’s face into “a pricked pastry” or send a bay crawling “with whitecaps like maggots seething in a broad wound.” It’s this sensory richness, people and landscapes described as injury, as food, as smell and sound, that made me feel full at the end, as though I’d taken a trip and felt more human for it, upon return.
Another aspect contributing to this is the intimate introduction to a lifestyle and a people that Proulx conveys. Here we know characters’ innermost motivations and histories, their predilections and pet-peeves. Proulx portrays Newfoundlanders who take tragedy like others might take soup with their sandwich: a matter of course, part of the full meal of life. Which is not to say tragedy hurts less. Here we have characters still whipped raw by losses and misdeeds suffered years, decades ago. Tragedy is nothing if not a consistent bedfellow, wedded to the survivors in searing rings of sorrow, shame, rage. Indeed, for a land incapable of recalling citizens once they leave, the only one who can return is Quoyle, he who suffers great tragedy like a local, betrothed to his own loss: “They would be lost forever if they went, for even the few who came back were altered in temper as a knife reclaimed from the ashes of a fire.” Quoyle’s own tragedy is why he returns to the land of his forebears and the framework for all else that happens. Perhaps Newfoundland demands nothing less.