by Annie Proulx
Tried to read this pre-MA days. A couple of times. Captured by the characters and the idea but never got further than meeting the Aunt. Why? Maybe it was the prose style. The disjointed sentences. The head hopping.
The MA has done something, because I finished the whole book yesterday and when I wasn’t reading it I wished I was. She writes like an angel. I don’t even like similes and now I want to use similes like Proulx.
The plot is the least of it. Quoyle grows up thinking he’s rubbish, lets himself be treated like rubbish, moves to Newfoundland, home of his horrible forebears, home of extreme weather. Learns to feel less like rubbish; discovers a dead body or two; learns love doesn’t have to be agony.
Looked at like this, The Shipping News could be The Gilmore Girls, or Virgin River (both available on Netflix, for your guilty pleasure). But it isn’t any of those. It strives to get to the heart of things and it does so in beautiful, precise prose. The characters are tricksy, difficult, flawed. The weather, the sea, are characters in their own right.
A theory book I read recently said literary fiction is interested in the character’s souls, their essence, as opposed to genre fiction which is concerned with material things. Paradoxically, you get to discuss souls by anchoring the characters in a very specific, detailed environment. ‘What is literary fiction and how to achieve it?’ is a question for another day, but I think it’s true that Proulx does this. She is interested in Quoyle’s very specific soul, in a very specific landscape and that is what makes The Shipping News such a compelling, successful story.
Just waving 
Yup! For me, Annie Proulx writes like she invented the whole damn writing thing. When I read her stories, I do that ‘read like a writer’ thing. Can’t help it. She makes me aware of her choosing words and building sentences, but that doesn’t take me out of the story. Other ‘writerly’ writers (no names!) annoy the bejeezus out of me – shouting Ooh! Look at me! I’m a writer! But not Proulx. She transplants me, I am there, in Newfoundland or Wyoming or wherever with her peculiar characters and the story swallows me up – AND I’m reading her words. She has that Schrodinger cat trick off just fine.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes! Yes! I’m so pleased to have finally found her – I think you made that happen? (I’ve got all her short story collections now, what a treat!)
LikeLike