Reading Order
The Shipping News Reading Order
The Shipping News (1993) by Annie Proulx is the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel that established her as one of the major American writers of the 1990s — the story of Quoyle, a hapless tabloid journalist whose wife is killed in an accident and who moves with his two daughters and his aunt to the remote Newfoundland town his family is from. The novel traces Quoyle's transformation in Newfoundland: he takes a job at the local paper covering the shipping news (arrivals and departures of boats in the harbor), falls in love, recovers from his past, and begins to become a person he can respect. The Shipping News is famous for several things: its syntactically compressed style (Proulx uses sentence fragments and unusual constructions constantly, creating a prose texture unlike anything else in American fiction), its portrait of Newfoundland (the landscape, the isolation, the weather, the specific texture of life in a very particular place), and its central warmth — it is a redemption story, and the redemption is genuine and earned. Each chapter begins with a quotation from The Ashley Book of Knots, the 19th-century mariner's reference, and the knot-tying metaphors carry through the novel's larger concern with how people tie themselves to places and to each other.
Where to start
The Shipping News — any Scribner paperback. Proulx's prose style requires some adjustment — the sentence fragments and compressed syntax can be jarring for the first few pages — but the style quickly becomes its own pleasure, and the novel is her most accessible major work.
Complete The Shipping News Book List
- 1Buy
The Shipping News
Annie Proulx·1993·The novel — Quoyle's move to Newfoundland after his wife's death; the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner; the redemption story and portrait of a very particular place that made Proulx famous. - 2Buy
Postcards
Annie Proulx·1992·Proulx's debut novel — Loyal Blood's flight from Vermont after a killing; the companion in her American landscape fiction; Postcards and The Shipping News together establish the range of her American geography. - 3Buy
Accordion Crimes
Annie Proulx·1996·Proulx's third novel — an accordion's passage through American immigrant communities across a century; the companion in her portrait of the American experience; structurally the most innovative of her novels. - 4Buy
Brokeback Mountain
Annie Proulx·1997·Proulx's most famous story — Ennis and Jack's summer on the mountain and the years after; the companion in her Wyoming fiction and the story that made her name beyond the Pulitzer. - 5Buy
Bird Cloud
Annie Proulx·2011·Proulx's memoir about building a house in Wyoming — the companion in understanding the relationship between place and writing that underlies all her fiction; the autobiographical portrait of the Wyoming landscape she has written about across her career. - 6Buy
Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier·1997·Frazier's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in the tradition of the place-rooted American novel with a distinctive prose style; Inman's journey through the North Carolina mountains is the Southern version of Quoyle's journey to Newfoundland. - 7Buy
Plainsong
Kent Haruf·1999·Haruf's novel about a small Colorado plains town — the companion in the tradition of the American novel rooted in a specific landscape; Holt, Colorado's people and their quiet lives are the plains version of what Proulx is doing in Newfoundland and Wyoming. - 8Buy
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson·1980·Robinson's debut novel — the companion in the tradition of American fiction with a distinctive, heightened prose style rooted in a specific landscape; Ruth's Idaho is the earlier literary version of what Proulx is doing with Newfoundland's maritime world.
The Shipping News — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Shipping News about?
The Shipping News is the story of Quoyle — a large, shambling, self-described failure who works for a tabloid newspaper in New York and whose beautiful, faithless wife Petal is killed in a car accident (while trying to sell their daughters to a child pornographer, which is darkly comic in Proulx's way). Quoyle's aunt, Agnis Hamm, proposes that they move to Killick-Claw, Newfoundland, where the Quoyle family is from. They do — taking Quoyle's daughters Bunny and Sunshine — and the novel follows the family's first years in Newfoundland: Quoyle's job at the local paper covering the shipping news, his falling in love with Wavey Prowse, the uncovering of the family's dark past in the house they inhabit, and Quoyle's gradual discovery that he is not actually a failure.
What is Proulx's prose style like?
Annie Proulx's prose style in The Shipping News (and throughout her fiction) is highly distinctive — compressed, syntactically fragmented, full of unusual constructions. She uses sentence fragments constantly ('The harbor. A green light. A boat.'), employs unusual or archaic words, and packs dense sensory and geographical detail into short phrases. The style can be jarring on first encounter but quickly becomes its own pleasure — it creates a texture of observation that is specific and vivid in a way that more conventional prose rarely achieves. Proulx has said she was influenced by Annie Dillard's nature writing and by the Newfoundland dialect she heard while researching the novel, and both influences show in the prose's attention to the particular and its rhythmic compression.
Why does each chapter begin with a knot quotation?
Each chapter of The Shipping News begins with a quotation from The Ashley Book of Knots (1944), a comprehensive guide to mariner's knots. The quotations describe specific knots — their names, their uses, their properties — and work as epigraphs that comment obliquely on each chapter's content. The organizing metaphor is double: knots as the way sailors tie things together (rope to rope, rope to anchor, ship to dock), and knots as the way people tie themselves to places, to each other, and to their own pasts. Quoyle's story is about loosening the knots that hold him to his unhappy past and tying new knots — to Newfoundland, to Wavey, to his daughters, to his own emerging self.
How accurate is the Newfoundland setting?
The Newfoundland setting in The Shipping News is extensively researched — Proulx spent substantial time in Newfoundland before and during the writing, interviewing people, studying the dialect, and learning the physical and social geography. The landscape, the weather, the specific texture of outport life, the Newfoundland speech patterns (several characters speak in a dialect that is historically accurate), and the details of the fishing and shipping culture are all carefully observed. The fictional town of Killick-Claw is composite but recognizable to anyone who knows the Newfoundland outport tradition. Proulx has said that place-research is central to all her fiction — she cannot write about a place she hasn't inhabited for substantial time.
What should I read after The Shipping News?
After The Shipping News, Postcards (1992) is Proulx's debut novel and the companion in her American landscape fiction. Accordion Crimes (1996) is her most structurally ambitious novel. Brokeback Mountain (1997) is her most famous story and the gateway to her Wyoming fiction. For American novels in the same tradition of place-rooted fiction with distinctive prose, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and Kent Haruf's Plainsong are the most important companions.
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