“Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns” (opening line).
Annie Proulx’s second novel The Shipping News offers a striking, poignant portrait of life in coastal Newfoundland as a family accidentally discovers their dark past. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News follows the life of a hapless failson named Quoyle (pronounced “coil”). Well, actually Quoyle is his family name, but we are never really given his first name in the novel. Quoyle is an awkward ne’erdowell who “stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life.” He is a soft loner, a dropout with reddish hair and he is large, with “a great damp loaf of a body.” Notably, he cannot swim (and consequently fears water) thanks to his abusive father who often forced him into the water as a child.
Quoyle lands in Mockingburg, New York and finds work at The Mockingburg Record, a local newspaper which periodically fires him. He befriends a short black man named Partridge and his wife Mercalia (though the couple soon moves to California). One day, Quoyle meets a tempestuous, flirty woman named Petal Bear, “in another time, another sex, she would have been a Genghis Khan” (13). Quoyle quickly falls in love with her and they are married, though it is tragic because we learn “there was one month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering.” Petal gives birth to two children, Bunny and Sunshine, but she carelessly abandons them. She tries to get a divorce from Quoyle, but he refuses. Petal starts doing pornographic films and sleeping with many different men (even bringing them home to humiliate Quoyle). Things come to a head when she kidnaps the children and sells them off to be sexually abused, however she suddenly dies in a car accident and Quoyle manages to retrieve the girls before anything awful can happen to them. Despite everything Petal did to Quoyle, he still manages to give her the benefit of the doubt (amazingly). But on top of it all, Quoyle’s father is then diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and his mother is diagnosed with a brain tumor. They both decide to mutually commit suicide via barbiturates.
Thus, we find Quoyle entirely alone, a sad and wayward single father, when his aunt swoops in and invites Quoyle and his daughters to join her on a return voyage to their familial homeland of Newfoundland, “the rock that had generated his ancestors” (we later learn Quoyle’s aunt is named Ms. Agnis Hamm but she is only called “the aunt” throughout the novel). This begins the true tale of The Shipping News as Quoyle and his daughters join the aunt in making the journey northward from New York to the craggy, windswept, “old world” coastal region of Killick-Claw, Newfoundland (Killick-Claw is a fictional town based on the real harbor town of Old Bonaventure).
“This place, she [Quoyle’s aunt] thought, this rock, six thousand miles of coast blind-wrapped in fog. Sunkers under wrinkled water, boats threading tickles between ice-scabbed cliffs. Tundra and barrens, a land of stunted spruce men cut and drew away… How many had come here, leaning on the rail as she leaned now. Staring at the rock in the sea. Vikings, the Basques, the French, English, Spanish, Portuguese. Drawn by the cod, from the days when massed fish slowed ships on the drift for the passage to the Spice Isles, expecting cities of gold” (32-33).
“‘Dad, are we scared?’ said Sunshine. ‘No, honey. It’s an adventure.’ Didn’t want them to grow up timid.” Here, the pace of the novel slows considerably as Quoyle takes a job at the local newspaper The Gammy Bird where he meets many of the eccentric, smarmy, grizzled, working-class stiffs in the community. The paper, saturated with quirky local news and goofy advertisements, is led by Mr. Jack Buggit, a snappy small man with a red forehead. But in a dribbling of dark humor, The Gammy Bird is known for featuring sexual assault stories (oddly enough), this section is run by a British man named B. Beaufield Nutbeem who often plagiarizes his news stories off the radio.
This regional study of Newfoundland could not be more distinct from Mockingburg, New York. Killick-Claw is a struggling fishermen’s town facing job loss, climate change, the incursion of oil tankers, and rising industrialism as politicians and poindexters from the capital St. John’s make failed promises to these old timey rustics. They feel abandoned and resentful, yet they pride themselves on spinning old fishermen yarns and recalling stories from World War II. There is a palpable in this novel tension between rural and urban values. Here, Proulx offers readers a remarkable portrait of crisp coastal breezes, jagged cliffsides, seadogs eating squidburgers, catching cod, and drinking tea and coffee. As a reader, you really feel like you are standing on the edge of the harbor in Killick-Claw. The Shipping News is a novel that deeply understands the lore, culture, and dialect of these unique coastal tradesmen. It does not condescend to, nor caricaturize, them. But while I found Proulx’s flair for local color engrossing, I found the bulk of the novel to be a tedious slog from this point forward.
Many scattered things seem to happen with little point or purpose: the aunt opens an upholstery business, the family renovates an old dilapidated home once owned by the Quoyles, Quoyle buys a janky boat (and very nearly drowns at one point), he starts reporting on the local “shipping news,” including the profile of a unique Dutch barge rumored to have been Hitler’s pleasure yacht, in addition to reports on car wrecks (though these awaken sad memories of Petal for Quoyle). There is a drunken party that sinks Nutbeem’s boat, Quoyle’s daughter Bunny continues to claim she sees a white dog around town (and Quoyle later wonders if she may be suffering an emotional imbalance). Quoyle slowly falls in love with a tall widow named Wavey Prowse. She lost her husband in a drowning accident and has a son named Herry with Down’s Syndrome (we later learn the boy’s father was a rampant womanizer who fathered many children out of wedlock). Billy Pretty, one of the other sailors who works for The Gammy Bird, gives Quoyle counsel, echoing his father’s traditional colloquialism about the different women a man encounters in his life: “Ar, that? Let’s see. Used to say there were four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman.” For Quoyle, Wavey is the “Tall and Quiet Woman.” This seems to give Quoyle a measure of comfort. At any rate, on his other wandering misadventures Quoyle accidentally discovers a murder – while out with Billy, he spots a suitcase near Gaze Island containing the severed head of Bayonet Melville (owner of the “Tough Baby” Hitler’s Dutch boat). The rest of Melville’s body is later discovered, the killer was very likely his wife, Silver, who is eventually caught in Hawaii.
In fact, there is quite a lot of monstrous violence in The Shipping News – murder, drowning, rioting, suicide, rape, incest, you name it – but it is all explored with a level of irony, dark humor, and distance, preventing the reader from becoming too morose. Indeed, Annie Proulx’s prose is abrupt and jagged, much like the looming coastline of Killick-Claw itself. Her sentences are often trimmed down to visceral sensations, half-observations, thoughts, and emotions. Here are a few examples: “Beyond the glass the sea lay pale as milk, pale the sky, scratched and scribbled with cloud welts. The empty bay, far shore creamed with fog” (103), “The long horizon, the lunging, clotted sea like a swinging door opening, closing, opening” (159), “…the gauzy horizon had become a great billowing wall less than a mile away, a curtain of fog rolling over maroon water” (172), “The ocean twitched like a vast cloth over snakes” (193), “A few torn pieces of early morning cloud the shape and color of salmon fillets” (294), and “Pack ice like broken restaurant dishes still in the bay” (324).
The effect is both inviting and jarring, leading us to search for grounding in this unmoored world, where there is need for knotting to tie things down. In fact, knots serve as a chief metaphor in The Shipping News. Each chapter begins with a thematically-inspired quotation from the 1944 publication entitled The Ashley Book of Knots by Clifford W. Ashley. Each chapter epigraph offers an important idea that sets the tone, a little metaphorical mystery for us to unravel. And in the opening acknowledgments, Annie Proulx describes how she found The Ashley Book of Knots at a yard sale for a quarter and she describes how even the protagonist’s name, Quoyle, is a reference to a “coil of rope.” Throughout the novel, knots are important imagery for the characters, often binding things down, whether boats, houses, or even people who are seeking an anchor in the storm.
Along the tempest-tossed Atlantic coastline, people are always at the mercy of the elements. We see this most starkly when The Shipping News comes to a close. A huge storm comes in and blows the old Quoyle house clear off the cliffside. Additionally, Jack Buggit becomes entangled in a knot while lobster fishing and he is presumed drowned until he miraculously coughs and awakens during his own wake! As it turns out, Jack was merely suffering from the effects of pneumonia. There is hope in a renewed life. And the final metaphorical knot tied in the book is Quoyle’s marriage to Wavey. Over time, they both decide to share their past relationship trauma and both become natural parental figures for their children (Wavey gifts a white puppy to Bunny and Herry starts calling Quoyle “Dad”).
The Shipping News ends on a hopeful note, but this is by no means a cheap or sentimental novel, there is considerable depth here. There are still many secrets lurking among the “malefic spirits” in Killick-Claw. Some of the old sailors like Billy Pretty, who only briefly acknowledges a “personal affliction” which has prevented him from getting married, still cling to the region’s past. One of the darkest secrets in Killick-Claw concerns the Quoyle family, many of whom were evil, insane, unintelligent, and inbred. “Nothing good ever happened with a Quoyle,” as the saying goes. Nearby Omaloor Bay was named after the Quoyles, many of whom are now buried in the Quoyle cemetery on Gaze Island (there is an amusing old legend about the Quoyles once dragging a greenhouse out to Quoyle’s Point across the ocean’s ice sheet nearly a century earlier). Suffice to tsay the Quoyles are somewhat notorious. Along these lines, another character who makes a brief appearance (there are a great many in The Shipping News) is Quoyle’s mentally unstable cousin Nolan who reveals a dark secret of his own, namely that Quoyle’s father once raped the aunt (his own sister) when she was young, which led to her having an abortion. The Quoyle family cycle of trauma and violence has continued into the present-day, but there seems to be hope for the new generation (Quoyle and his children).
The Shipping News is a novel that invites us to examine our own knots, the binds have tied our own lives together. The novel reminds us that amidst all the squalls of the world sometimes all we have is each other. Some knots break, like Quoyle’s marriage with Petal, while others remain fastened, like his marriage to Wavey, and still others are uprooted entirely, causing an ancestral home to fall into the milky sea. Maybe all we can do is hope that we tied the ropes tight enough to withstand the coming storm. It is comforting to know that love is possible, even for a loner like Quoyle. His love for Wavey and his children moors him, but there are still some knots that can come untethered, sending things tumbling into the sea.
Notable Quotations:
“Here is an account of a few years in the life of Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and raised in a shuffle of dreary upstate towns” (opening line).
“At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to Newfoundland, the rock that had generated his ancestors, a place he had never been nor thought to go… A watery place. And Quoyle feared water, could not swim. Again and again the father had broken his clenched grip and thrown him into pools, brooks, lakes and surf… From this youngest son’s failure to dog-paddle the father saw other failures multiply like an explosion of virulent cells –failure to speak clearly; failure to sit up straight; failure to get up in the morning; failure in attitude; failure in ambition and ability; indeed, in everything. His own failure” (1-2).
“Nothing was clear to lonesome Quoyle. His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drifting into arctic half-light, called the Sea-Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled” (3).
“Quoyle hated the thought of an incestuous, fit-prone, seal-killing child for a grandfather, bt there was no choice. The mysteries of unknown family” (25).
“‘As you get older you find out the place where you started out pulls at you stronger and stronger. I never wanted to see Newfoundland again when I was young, but the last few years it’s been like an ache, just a longing to go back. Probably some atavistic drive to finish up where you started’” (29).
“She had not been back in these waters since she was a young girl, but it rushed back, the sea’s hypnotic boil, the smell of blood, weather and salt, fish heads, spruce smoke and reeking armpits, the rattle of wash-ball rocks in hissing waves, turrs, the crackery taste of brewis, the bedroom under the eaves” (33).
“Saw her. The tall woman in the green slicker. Marching along the edge of the road as usual, her hood pushed back. A calm, almost handsome face, ruddy hair in braids wound round her head in an old-fashioned cornet. Her hair was wet. She was alone. Looked right at him. They waved simultaneously and Quoyle guessed she must have legs like a marathon runner” (86).
“Silence, the sea unfolding in pieces. A skiff and bobbing dory, men leaning to reset a cod trap. Quoyle glanced, saw her pale mouth, neck, eyes somewhere between green glass and earth color. Rough hands. Not so young; heading for forty. But that sense of harmony with something, what, the time or place. He didn’t know but felt it. She turned her head, caught him looking. Eyes flicked away again. But both were pleased” (129).
“…speaking of named rocks, we got ‘em all along, boy, thousands and thousands of miles with wash balls and sunkers and known rocks every foot of the way. Newfoundland itself is a great rock in the sea, and the islands stribbled around it are rocks” (162).
“All the complex wires of life were stripped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time” (196).
“At last the end of the world, a wild place that seemed poised on the lip of the abyss. No human sign, nothing, no ship, no plane, no animal, no bird, no bobbing trap marker nor buoy. As though he stood alone on the planet. The immensity of sky roared at him and instinctively he raised his hands to keep it off. Translucent thirty-foot combers the color of bottles crashed onto stone. Eve hundreds of feet above the sea the salt mist stung his eyes and beaded his face and jacket with fine droplets. Waves struck with the hallowed basso peculiar to ovens and mouseholes” (209).
“These 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, 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 remottled 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).
“Have you noticed Jack’s uncanny sense about assignments? He gives you a beat that plays on your private inner fears. Look at you. Your wife was killed in an auto accident. What does Jack ask you to cover? Car wrecks, to get pictures while the upholstery is still on fire and the blood still hot. He gives Billy, who has never married for reasons unknown, the home news, the women’s interest page, the details of home and hearth — must be exquisitely painful to the old man. And me. I get to cover the wretched sexual assaults. And with each one I relive my own childhood. I was assaulted at school for three years, first by a miserable geometry teacher, then by older boys who were his cronies. To this day I cannot sleep without wrapping up like a mummy in five or six blankets. And what I don’t know is if Jack understands what he’s doing, if the pain is supposed to ease and dull through repetitive confrontation, or if it just persists, as fresh as on the day of the first personal event. I’d say it persists” (221, Nutbeem speaking to Quoyle).
“Well, that life had hardened her, she had made her own way along the rough coasts, had patched and mended he sails, replaced chafed gear with strong, fit stuff. She had worked her way off the rocks and shoals. Had managed. Still managed” (226).
“‘Herold,’ said Wavey, ‘was a womanizer. He treated me body like a tough. Come and swill and slobber in me after them. I felt like he was casting vomit in me when he come to his climax. And I never told that but to you’” (307-308).
“Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some might invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull’s-eyes and peppermints a few rare one; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought calm and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?” (315).
“By midnight the wind was straight out of the west and he heard the moan leap to bellowing, a terrible wind out of the catalog of winds. A wind related to the Blue Norther, the frigid Blaast and the Landlash. A cousin to the Bull’s-eye squall that started in a small cloud with a ruddy center, mother-in-law to the Vinds-gnyr of the Norse sagas, the three-day Nor’easters of maritime New England. An uncle wind to the Alaskan Williwaw and Ireland’s wild Doinionn. Stesister to the Koshava that assaults the Yugoslavan plains with Russian snow, the Steppenwind, and the violent Buran from the great open steppes of central Asia, the Crivetz, the frigid Viugas and Purgas of Siberia, and from the north of Russia the ferocious Myatel. A blood brother of the prairie Blizzard, the Canadian arctic screamer known simply as Northwind, and the Pittarak smoking down off Greenland’s ice fields. This nameless wind scraping the Rock with an edge like steel” (317-318).
“The great rock stood naked. Bolts fast in the stone, a loop of cable curled like a hawser. And nothing else. For the house of the Quoyles was gone, lifted by the wind, tumbled down the rock and into the sea in a wake of glass and snow crystals” (322).
“A stillness. Mist the depth of a hand on the water, blurred the jumbled shore. Rock ledges like black metal straps held the sea to the land. Quoyle inhaled, cold air rushed up his nose and he was guilty because Jack was dead and here he was, still breathing” (328).
“Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops gve off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery” (337).
The 1994 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1994 Pulitzer jury consisted of three returning fiction jury members:
- Chair: Philip F. O’Connor (1916-2008) was a short story writer and successful novelist. He was born in San Francisco, California attended St. Ignatius Preparatory School and earned a BS at the University of San Francisco in 1954. During his army service, he was stationed in England and afterward worked as a journalist for the San Francisco News and taught high school English before earning an MA in English from San Francisco State College in 1961 and earned an MFA from the Creative Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1963. He taught English at Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, New York from 1963-1967 and then established the creative writing program at Bowling Green State University, where he spent the bulk of his academic career as director and writer-in-residence. He retired from academia in 1994 and pursued writing full-time. He was a finalist for a National Book Award for “First Novel” in 1980 for his novel Stealing Home; and later publications have claimed his next two novels Defending Civilization and Finding Brendan were both nominated for Pulitzer Prizes (however technically any novel can be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; neither of these novels were Pulitzer Fiction finalists in either 1989 or 1991). According to his obituary, he had seven children, was married twice, and passed away peacefully in his sleep in 2018.
- Frank D. McConnell (1942-1999) was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame summa cum laude in 1964, then went on to Yale University where he received his M.A. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1968 with a dissertation on Wordsworth’s The Prelude under the direction of Harold Bloom. He taught English at Cornell University (1967-1971), and Northwestern University (1971-1981). He joined the English faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 1982 where he would teach for 16 years. He published several books including The Confessional Imagination: A Reading of Wordsworth’s Prelude, The Spoken Seen: Film and the Romantic Imagination, Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth and Pynchon, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature, and The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. After arriving in California, McConnell published a series of detective novels about a nun who inherits her father’s investigative agency (Murder Among Friends, Blood Lake, The Front King, and Liar’s Poker). He wrote a regular humorous column in the Catholic journal Commonweal. Upon his death in 1999, the University of California wrote an In Memoriam: “With Frank McConnell’s death on 17 January 1999, the UCSB Department of English lost its most popular undergraduate teacher. With lectures at once passionate and irreverent, often ribald, he held classes of five to seven hundred students spellbound on subjects as diverse as science fiction and Shakespeare. His colleagues knew him as prodigiously wide in his learning–as well as brilliantly witty, always ready with a comic story of sharp quip.” He was a Guggenheim fellow, a Fulbright professor in Germany, and served on several Pulitzer Prize for Fiction juries (twice as chair). He was married twice, divorced once, and was survived by two sons when he died in 1999.
- Gail Caldwell (1951-present): was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas and attended Texas Tech University before transferring to the University of Texas at Austin where she obtained two degrees in American studies. She was an instructor at the University of Texas until 1981 and taught feature writing at Boston University before working as the arts editor of the Boston Review and wrote for other publications like the New England Monthly and the Village Voice. However, she was primarily renowned for her many years serving as the chief book critic for The Boston Globe (1985-2009). Caldwell would later win the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She served several times on the fiction jury for the Pulitzer Prize; serving as chair of the jury in both 1995 and 1997. As of the time I am writing this review, she apparently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has written three memoirs: A Strong West Wind (2006), Let’s Take the Long Way Home (2010), and New Life, No Instructions (2014). She has been open about her childhood bout of polio and her struggles with alcoholism.
Philip O’Connor’s jury report to the Pulitzer Prize Board (dated December 18, 1993), identified the other two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994: The Collected Stories by Reynold Price and Operation Shylock by Philip Roth. Interestingly enough, the jury did not rank any of its three nominees; they simply left the final selection entirely up to the Board (I would be delighted if one day the backroom deliberations of the Pulitzer Board come to light, much like what John Hohenberg published).
In the jury report, a brief assessment of each of the three nominees is offered. I have faithfully copied the jury’s commentary on The Shipping News below:
“Readers of E. Annie Proulx’s previous fiction (Heart Songs and her first novel, Postcards) are already acquainted with the understated force of her inimitable handscrabble prose. The Shipping News confirms that Proulx’s is one of the most original narrative gifts to come along in years. The voice that dominates the novel is one of crystalline poise — as evocative in its depth and texture as the Newfoundland coastline it describes. In monitoring the misadventures of Quoyle, a bumbling newspaperman trying to save himself and his young daughters, Proulx delivers an uproarious newsroom sendup as marked by comic melancholy as Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. But it is the language of this oddly fierce and captivating novel that makes it so memorable: its onomatopoeic merger of land and sensibility, with a pure passion for the sounds of words. If fiction’s triumph is to create an inner world rivaling the real thing, Proulx’s Newfoundland — a place of eccentric loners and milk-white seas — surely pulses in the reader’s ind as much as any living memory.”
Who is Annie Proulx?
Edna Ann “Annie” or “E. Annie” Proulx, pronounced “prue” (1935-present) was born in Connecticut, the eldest of five sisters (though she admitted that she often yearned for a brother as a child). Her father rose from low class to become vice president of a textile mill and her mother was a painter, amateur naturalist, and avid storyteller. She has often credited her mother with helping invoke her love of observation and story-telling. Proulx wrote her first story at the age of 10, while sick with the chicken pox. When she grew, she attended Colby College, where she met her first husband, H. Ridgely Bullock Jr. She dropped out of college to marry him in 1955 (they later divorced in 1960). They had a daughter, Sylvia “Muffy,” who went to live with her father after the divorce. Proulx later returned to college, studying at the University of Vermont from 1966 to 1969, and graduating cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in History in 1969. She then had a second brief marriage that ended in divorce and married her third and final husband James Hamilton Lang in 1969. They had three daughters before divorcing, as well. Proulx later reflected in her Paris Review interview: “I don’t think I was a particularly good or diligent mother. It took a long time for the obvious to become obvious: I could not operate in a conventional family… I back away from life, I observe it. The jolly family circle and loving husband: those things are not for me.”
Proulx earned an MA in History from Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal, Quebec in 1973. She pursued a PhD at Concordia and passed her oral examinations in 1975, but abandoned her dissertation before finishing the degree. Reportedly, this was due to a lack of available teaching jobs in her field as well as her general disillusionment with academia. But in 1999, Concordia awarded her an honorary doctorate anyway.
After beginning her career as a journalist, Proulx’s first published work of fiction was a science fiction short story entitled “The Customs Lounge,” published in the September 1963 issue of If magazine under the name “E.A. Proulx” (the name E.A. Proulx was to disguise the fact that she was a woman). But Proulx’s first published collection of short stories would not be published for a couple decades in 1988 when she was in her fifties (she had returned to writing fiction after her youngest daughter entered school). Proulx was a latecomer to the literary scene, publishing her first novel Postcards when she was 56. Since then, she has written numerous works of nonfiction, collections of essays, five novels, and four short story collections (to date). The most famous of her short story collections is likely Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999) which contains the story “Brokeback Mountain” (the story was later adapted into the award-winning film as well as an opera). She has been the recipient of a long list of accolades, including an National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Dos Passos Prize, an O. Henry Prize, a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (a lifetime achievement award), and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, among many others. Notably, she was the first woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Apparently, Proulx regards her short fiction as her greatest achievement, particularly her three collections of Wyoming stories: Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), and Fine Just the Way It Is (2008). However, she has expressed regret for writing “Brokeback Mountain,” claiming that the film adaptation led to widespread misunderstanding and therefore insult, particularly over its ending.
Proulx has rarely lived in the same place for more than a few years. She resided for decades in rural New England towns throughout Vermont. In the ’90s, following her three divorces, she lived a fairly rustic, DIY lifestyle with her children –fishing, hunting, birding and the like. In 1994-1995, she bought a 640-acre ranch dubbed “Bird Cloud” in Wyoming (the subject of her 2011 memoir Bird Cloud: A Memoir), before reportedly relocating to Washington and then back to New England. In the past, she also spent parts of her time living in Newfoundland and New Mexico. She has been married and divorced three times, and has four children: three sons and a daughter (Jonathan, Gillis, Morgan, and Sylvia).
At the time I am writing this review, Annie Proulx is 90 years old. She has sometimes described herself as “bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered and single-minded.” She has only given a handful of interviews in recent years, but over the past couple decades she has spoken at length with the likes of The Guardian and The Paris Review, both interviews display her delightfully prickly personality.
Film Adaptations:
- The Shipping News (2001)
- Director: Lasse Hallström
- Starring: Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Scott Glenn, Rhys Ifans, Pete Postlethwaite, and Cate Blanchett
Further Reading:
- Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), a short story collection featuring “Brokeback Mountain,” which was the basis of the 2005 film of the same name.
- Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (2004), short story collection
- Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 (2008), short story collection
Literary Context 1993-1994
- 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature: awarded to African-American novelist Toni Morrison “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”
- 1993 National Book Award Winner: The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
- 1993 Booker Prize Winner: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1993 was The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. Other notable bestsellers included The Client by John Grisham, Slow Walz in Cedar Bend by Robert James Waller, Without Remorse by Tom Clancy, and Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King, Vanished by Danielle Steel, Lasher by Anne Rice, and The Scorpio Illusion by Robert Ludlum.
- The Giver by Lois Lowry was published.
- The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenidies was published.
- The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler was published.
- Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose was published.
- The Last Command by Timothy Zahn was published, the third and final installment in the original “Heir to the Empire” Star Wars trilogy of books. Another Star Wars book, The Truce at Bakura by Kathy Tyers, was also published.
- The Hope by Herman Wouk was published.
- Transpotting by Irvine Welsh was published.
- Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa was published.
- Never Send Flowers by John Gardner was published, a James Bond continuation novel.
- Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen was published.
- Two more installments in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series were published.
- Clarissa Oakes by Patrick O’Brian, the fifteenth novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series, was published.
- The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields was published, though it would technically win the Pulitzer Prize the following year.
Did the Right Book Win?
With The Shipping News, I was naturally drawn to Annie Proulx’s uniquely laconic whetted-stone prose, and her flair for depicting the unique local color of Newfoundland, as well as her remarkable use of metaphor with respect to coils and knots, however on the whole I didn’t really care for The Shipping News. I found it a dreary and wandering read, particularly during the midsection of the novel, leading me to suspect this might have been better served as a short story. However, I know there are a great many fans of The Shipping News and I’m always willing to shift my opinion. Perhaps I will give this a re-read one day. But with that being said, I’m not aware of another novel published in 1993 that would be more fitting for the Pulitzer Prize, so The Shipping News stands as a defensible choice.
Proulx, Annie. The Shipping News. Published by Scribner, used under license of Simon & Schuster, New York, New York, 2003 (originally published in 1993). Proulx dedicated the book to her three sons “Jon, Gillis and Morgan.”
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