Thinking of Quoyle

The National Book Award is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, and there’s an awesome blog set up to commemorate this, with authors writing up reviews of the Award-winners for each year. It’s such a treasure trove of content and I am making my way through it slowly, trying not to read too much in one sitting.

Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News was, of course, the winner in 1993. I have written before about how that book had become omnipresent in my life even before I had read it, and after I had read it, forget about it. I actually have never gone back to read it again, because my first experience reading it was so specific, so special and memorable, I’m afraid that all of that will change. Besides, entire set-pieces from the book are preserved in my mind, almost word for word, not to mention the last paragraph which I still cannot think about without remembering my response the first time I read it. That book cracked me open like a walnut.

Here is the entry from the National Book Award blog on Shipping News, with two wonderful essays – one from Bob Shacochis (I love his memories of Proulx, of that crazy time in both of their lives), and one from Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation, one of my daily blog-reads.

Not to be missed.

I wonder if I will ever read it in its entirety again. It is so representative to me not only of a certain time in my life, a certain season, but also my family, and what it means to be a part of my particular family (my parents finally got so frustrated with my not reading The Shipping News that they sent me my own copy – subtle!), and how grateful I am, and happy, and sad at the same time, that my family is what it is. The Shipping News always makes me think of family. It also makes me think of a man I was in love with in the mid-90s, who also seemed determined that I MUST read The Shipping News, and by the time I did get around to reading it, the situation between us had fallen apart, and so the book is so full (for me) of my grief and sadness in the aftermath, and how much I wanted to talk to him about the book, and why he had wanted me to read it, but by that point it was too late to ask him. It’s a theme..

Powerful. Some books are just like that. They act as a kind of converging point, where all aspects of life dovetail. A book that seems personal. Not only were you reading it at a time that you remember very well, but the book itself seemed to have something specific to say to you – to YOU, specifically!

And here, with a clarity I can barely be with right now, is a section from the first chapter of The Shipping News:

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.

God almighty. Nobody like Proulx. I would recognize her writing in a dark alley.

Make sure you read the two essays about Shipping News.