The Books: “The Shipping News” (Annie Proulx)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx.

(Some of my thoughts on this book are already on this blog – I went through some of the posts and pulled some of my own language … so I am plagiarizing myself, frankly. I give myself permission.)

My experience of The Shipping News was what I call “one of THOSE reading experiences”. I can count “THOSE” reading experiences on almost one hand. By that I mean: intensely personal – I take the book not just as a book, but a message that seems directly to me. I feel pointed out by the book. I feel recognized. I feel seen. I think: “How on earth could this author know about what goes on in the deepest recesses of my soul?” It’s almost embarrassing, that feeling. You don’t want people to know your own pettiness, your own sadness, your own cruelty, your lies. I am different when I finish the book, because of this recognition factor. You can’t have “one of THOSE reading experiences” too often. It takes too much out of you.

Other books that were like that for me:

— Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn (excerpt here)
— Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving (excerpt here)
— Atonement, by Ian McEwan (excerpt here)

Atonement was such a devastating book that it still seems radioactive to me. I went to pick it up and flip through it again a while back, glanced at a couple of paragraphs, and thought: “Uhm. No. No need to read this again.”

I don’t think I will ever put myself through Geek Love again. (However, I don’t want to make this sound too bleak and grim. I’m not talking about sad books. I’m talking about books that feel like they were written for me and me alone.) These are books that describe the human condition in such a way that I feel KNOWN. The spotlight shines onto the darker corners. These books slice back any artifice I might hold onto. These books made me look into the abyss. My own abyss. To see my own sham, my own drudgery, my own redemption.

THOSE reading experiences.

The Shipping News was one of THOSE books for me.

There was a good 5 or 6 months in 1994 when it seemed like everyone was reading that book. I saw people on the El train reading it. My entire family read it. Everyone talked about it. My parents kept pestering me: “Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?” They seemed personally invested in me, specifically, reading The Shipping News. (And now, having read the book, I see why) I remember, to this day, how my dad described the book to me. The characters, what it was about … Every conversation I had with my parents, the same refrain: “Have you read The Shipping News yet?” Finally, I would just cut to the chase before they even asked: “I’m doing great, I got cast in a show, I’m doing great, and NO, I haven’t read The Shipping News yet.”

So, of course, I didn’t read it. You never do anything just because 5,000 people tell you have to.

I was madly in love with someone in 1994. And he, too, was on the “YOU OF ALL PEOPLE HAVE TO READ THE SHIPPING NEWS.” chorus-line. I just rolled my eyes at him. He went on vacation at one point, to Florida – and he came back … this was when we were in the flirty unexpressed part of the whole thing … madly in love but not admitting it … and he said, “I thought about you my entire vacation.” “You did?” “Yeah. I sat on the beach and read The Shipping News and I just kept wanting to tell you how much you would love this book. It reminds me of you.” “It does?” “Totally!” “Why?” But he never could say why. All he said was, “The lead character is this … kind of loser guy … a sad sap … who has a really big chin … and he gets a job on a newspaper … and he starts to see his entire life in terms of headlines … ” That was all he would say. I still couldn’t get a line on why this book reminded him of me. Loser guy? Sad sap? Big chin? And … this to you says SHEILA? You wanna explain that to me??

On the very same day that this man told me “YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK”, I came home and there was a package in my mailbox from my parents. I opened it up, and there was a dern copy of the book.

It makes me laugh, in retrospect. They were desperate for me to read it. They just knew how I would respond to it, and they could. not. wait. for me to read it on my own.

And I’m not exaggerating … I got the package on the same day I talked with Love-Man. I laughed out loud when I pulled out The Shipping News, like: “Okay, universe, okay, I GET THE MESSAGE!”

Long story even longer (see this is why this book means so much to me … it’s all wrapped in that year – 1994 – a wacko year if ever there was one):

I still didn’t read the damn book though, at that time … because my life got nuts and kind of awful. Love-Man and I ended up not working out … and it was a huge disaster with long-term implications. It wrecked my life. And suddenly I couldn’t bear to even LOOK at The Shipping News. It seemed to represent him or something. I remember being bummed out, though (in addition to all the other stuff I was bumming on) – thinking: Wow, I’ll probably never read that book now.

But I did. A year later. I had moved from Chicago to New York by then. Everything was different, including my zip code. My entire life had changed in 6 months. So I picked up that book.

And never. EVER. wanted it to end.

EVER.

I will never forget my experience reading that book. It shimmers in my memory. I laughed out loud. It gave me searing pain. And at times, I could feel myself not really reading, but searching, searching for clues … clues as to why Love-Man had thought of me so much when he read it. Maybe it would tell me something about him, maybe it would illuminate for me something about how he felt about me, and how I should interpret the fact that everything was wrecked. The book is about a bunch of weirdos who live in Newfoundland. Why was that book so full of me for him? I will never know now. But I do know that The Shipping News is also so full of him for me – to this day. I mean … it’s about pain, and redemption … about finding what it is that you do (or are supposed to do), and then doing it like Hercules. It’s about thinking that you have a “lot” in life. That you have a certain path, and then … often with wrenching results … you go another way. But … I can’t even talk about what that book is about. It’s not about what it’s about.

The writing is startling. It’s a rare rare thing, to come across an original voice. Proulx’s voice in that book is original. It’s funny, it’s biting … each character has a different and distinct speaking pattern, accent. Everyone has secrets. Things are left unexplained. This is not a book where nothing happens. The plot is out of control. So interesting. You are introduced to a small three-dimensional world, full of weirdos, cranks, curmudgeons, and lonely hermits. And yet … while they may not be “likable”, in any sense, you end up loving them.

My experience, by the end of that book, was painful. It wasn’t that anything bad happened. No. It was that it brought up all this weird love in my heart – for these characters, for the Love-Man, for my parents and siblings, for Annie Proulx – love that HURT. Like, you want to clutch your heart and say “Ouch.”

The last paragraph of the book is not just amazing – it’s transcendent. Transcendent. After spending time with all the crabs and secretive curmudgeons and unpleasant people in the book … to have Annie Proulx draw back the curtain … and let the heart flow forth … in that last paragraph … It was almost too much for me. So many writers today resist the large message. And it’s understandable why – it’s really difficult to do well. Cynicism, too, is in style – but the success of Annie Proulx shows that cynicism isn’t the only style today (something you might miss in the omnipresent bitching and moaning of the “what has happened to today’s society?? Everyone is so cynical” nitwits. Yeah, well, nitwits: I suggest you all widen your reading list a little bit, how’s that? Everyone is cynical? Really? Everyone? Huh.) Proulx does not pull her punches. I so admire that. She does not try to hide emotion, or present it subtly, or bury the message in layers of metaphor. Nope. She is unafraid. She comes right out and says it, and she says it so well (that last paragraph!!) that I feel her hand coming out of her prose and grabbing me by the throat.

When I finished the book, how much I wanted to go back in time and talk with the guy I loved (and still loved) about it … talk about every tiny detail. But the time for that was long long past. I felt a lot of sadness and loss about that.

I’ll probably do a couple excerpts, we’ll see. I was flipping thru the book this morning, and the prose, once again, just leapt off the page … I would recognize Annie Proulx’s writing anywhere, in a blind copy of something I could probably guess it was her. I couldn’t imitate it if I tried – it is completely her own rhythm.

I have to excerpt the opening of the book. Because it has everything I’ve been talking about on display. Her odd jerky rhythm – she’s not big on full sentences – her absolutely specific Proulx-ian imagery (seriously, I can’t think of another writer to compare her to) – I mean: “features as bunched as kissed fingertips”. That is spectacular. I don’t know where she comes up with it – but it’s perfect … and in the beginning, she cuts to the chase of the story immediately. Not just the plot, but the story: Here is what we are going to hear about in the following book. To start a book like that takes balls. She’s got balls.

The Shipping News is one of my favorite books of all time. And thank you. Thank you to:
— parents
— siblings
— friends
— guy I loved
for making sure I read it.

I still read these beginning 3 pages and feel the awe start up in me all over again. Wow.

EXCERPT FROM The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx.

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.

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 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.

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 father’s 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 Quoyle’s 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 giant’s chin. As a child he invented stratagems to deflect stares: a smile, downcast gaze, the right hand darting up to cover the chin.

His earliest sense of self was as a distant figure: there in the foreground was his family; here, at the limit of the far view, was he. Until he was fourteen he cherished the idea that he had been given to the wrong family, that somewhere his real people, saddled with the changeling of the Quoyles, longed for him. Then, foraging in a box of excursion momentoes, he found photographs of his father beside brothers and sisters at a ship’s rail. A girl, somewhat apart from the others, looked toward the sea, eyes squinted, as though she could see the port of destination a thousand miles south. Quoyle recognized himself in their hair, their legs and arms. That sly-looking lump in the shrunken sweater, hand at his crotch, his father. On the back, scribbled in blue pencil, “Leaving Home, 1946.”

At the university he took courses he couldn’t understand, humped back and forth without speaking to anyone, went home for weekends of excoriation. At last he dropped out of school and looked for a job, kept his hand over his chin.

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.