Annie Proulx - Shipping News: A Novel (Scribner Classics)

WINNER OF THE 1994 PULITZER PRIZE

FOR FICTION

WINNER OF THE 1993 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

FOR FICTION

WINNER OF THE IRISH TIMES

INTERNATIONAL FICTION PRIZE

Named one of the notable books of the year by The New York Times

Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award

Ms. Proulx blends Newfoundland argot, savage history, impressively diverse characters, fine descriptions of weather and scenery, and comic horseplay without ever lessening the readers interest.

The Atlantic

Vigorous, quirky ... displays Ms. Proulxs surreal humor and her zest for the strange foibles of humanity.

Howard Norman, The New York Times Book Review

An exciting, beautifully written novel of great feeling about hot people in the northern ice.

Grace Paley

The Shipping News ... is a wildly comic, heart-thumping romance.... Here is a novel that gives us a hero for our times.

Sandra Scofield, The Washington Post Book World

The reader is assaulted by a rich, down-in-the-dirt, up-in-the-skies prose full of portents, repetitions, hold metaphors, brusque dialogues and set pieces of great beauty.

Nicci Gerrard, The Observer (London)

A funny-tragic Gothic tale, with a speed boat of a plot, overflowing with Black-comic characters. But its also that contemporary rarity, a tale of redemption and healing, a celebration of the resilience of the human spirit, and most rare of all perhaps, a sweet and tender romance.

Sandra Gwynn, The Toronto Star

ALSO BY E. ANNIE PROULX

Heart Songs and Other Stories

Postcards

THE

SHIPPING

NEWS

E. ANNIE PROULX

A TOUCHSTONE BOOK

Published by Simon & Schuster

New York London Toronto

Sydney Tokyo Singapore

TOUCHSTONE

Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places

and incidents are either products of the authors imagination

or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or

locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1993 by E. Annie Proulx

All rights reserved

including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

First Charles Scribners Sons Edition 1993

First Touchstone Edition 1994

TOUCHSTONE and colophon are

registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

is available. ISBN: 0-671-51005-3

For John, Gillis and Morgan

In a knot of eight crossings, which is about the average-size knot,

there are 256 different over-and-under arrangements

possible.... Make only one change in this over and under

sequence and either an entirely different knot is made

or no knot at all may result.

THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

Help came from many directions in the writing of The Shipping News. I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for financial support, and to the Ucross Foundation of Wyoming for a quiet place to work. In Newfoundland, advice, commentary and information from many people helped me understand old ways and contemporary changes on The Rock. The Newfoundland wit and taste for conversation made the most casual encounters a pleasure. I am particularly grateful for the kindness and good company of Bella Hodge of Gunners Cove and Goose Bay who suffered dog bite on my account and showed me the delights of Newfoundland home cooking. Carolyn Lavers opened my eyes to the complexities and strengths of Newfoundland women, as did novelist Bill Gough in his 1984 Mauds House. Canadian Coast Guard Search and Rescue personnel, the staff of the Northern Pen in St. Anthony, fishermen and loggers, the Atmospheric Environment Service of Environment Canada all told me how things worked. John Glusmans fine-tuned antennae caught the names of Newfoundland books I would otherwise have missed. Walter Punch of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society Library confirmed some obscure horticultural references. Thanks also to travel companions on trips to Atlantic Canada: Tom Watkin, who battled wind, bears and mosquitoes; my son Morgan Lang who shared an April storm, icebergs and caribou. I am grateful for the advice and friendship of Abi Thomas. Barbara Grossman is the editor of my dreamsclear blue sky in the heaviest fog. And without the inspiration of Clifford W. Ashleys wonderful 1944 work, The Ashley Book of Knots, which I had the good fortune to find at a yard sale for a quarter, this book would have remained just the thread of an idea.

THE

SHIPPING

NEWS

Quoyle: A coil of rope.

A Flemish flake is a spiral coil of one layer only.

It is made on deck, so that it may be

walked on if necessary.

THE ASHLEY BOOK OF KNOTS

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.

Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence. Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life, counting on nothing. He ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds.

His jobs: distributor of vending machine candy, all-night clerk in a convenience store, a third-rate newspaperman. 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.

[2] 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. Quoyle knew the flavor of brack and waterweed.

From this youngest sons failure to dog-paddle the father saw other failures multiply like an explosion of virulent cellsfailure 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.

Quoyle shambled, a head taller than any child around him, was soft. He knew it. Ah, you lout, said the father. But no pygmy himself. And brother Dick, the fathers favorite, pretended to throw up when Quoyle came into a room, hissed Lardass, Snotface, Ugly Pig, Warthog, Stupid, Stinkbomb, Fart-tub, Greasebag, pummeled and kicked until Quoyle curled, hands over head, sniveling, on the linoleum. All stemmed from Quoyles chief failure, a failure of normal appearance.

A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face.

Some anomalous gene had fired up at the moment of his begetting as a single spark sometimes leaps from banked coals, had given him a giants chin. As a child he invented stratagems to deflect stares; a smile, downcast gaze, the right hand darting up to cover the chin.