The Shipping News

Now that I have time to sit down and write about The Shipping News, I am having trouble remembering much about it. Please don't take this as an indication of how impactful the book was but more as an indication of mental exhaustion... or atrophy.

The Shipping News, winner of the Pulitzer in 1994, is about a man named Quoyle who falls in love and marries a "free-spirit" named Petal. To put it bluntly: "There was a month of fiery happiness. Then six kinked years of suffering. In another time, in another sex, she would have been Genghis Khan." However, through a series of unfortunate events, Quoyle is given a chance to start over with his aunt and two children, Sunshine and Bunny, when Petal dies in a car wreck, living him enough life insurance to move to Newfoundland, the land of his ancestors.

Quoyle gets a job there writing the shipping news for the local newspaper. His finds a new start among his co-workers and community members. And he even eventually finds love again. Not the all-consuming passion that he felt for Petal, but love that comes as quietly as night creeping into the shadows at the slow swing of day. Of course, more happens in the 345 pages, but I would hate to ruin it all for you.

While there were some oddities that stood out (i.e. - They called each other by seemingly formal titles: Aunt and Nephew.) and the book was a little slow to get into, it was overall a great read. I found myself neglecting chores just to sit and read it. As with many of the Pulitzer winners thus far, it was more about character development than plot line, it definitely honors the human experience, the falling away of the old to make room for the new, and the interconnectedness of us all.

Fourteen years after This Shipping News was published, we experience a massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. As BP incompetently attempts to repair it, I read a chapter in which Quoyle exclaims, " No one hangs a picture of an oil tanker on the wall." Oh that we have come so far. But we have all experienced it: Those were the good old days. Each generation longs for the familiar, for the way that it was. Even in a sleepy ol' town. Especially in a sleepy ol' town. "There's two ways of living here now. There's the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there's the new way. Work out, have a job, somebody tell you what to do, your brother's in South Africa, your mother's in Regina, buy every goddamn cockadoodle piece of Japanese crap you can. Leave home. Go off to look for work." As Edith Wharton so nicely put it, there is good in the old ways, but there is good in the new as well.

But it all comes down to love, love for each other and love for yourself:

"For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give 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, and that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery."

Happy reading...