The Shipping News

Basically this - really picks up towards the end https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/11938852

It seems like recently the trend in writing has been to over-explain and overshare, telling us every little thing that happens as well as 12 random thoughts the characters have while the little thing happens. This book was so different, so refreshingly different. A cigarette is tucked behind someone's ear when a scene opens, a few paragraphs later the person blows smoke out of their nose, and on the next page it's mentioned that the person lights a second cigarette. Do you see? The author never mentioned the lighting of the first cigarette. That is good writing, that is show don't tell, that is an author trusting us as readers.

Newfoundland, as brutal and comforting as the sea itself.

Battled hard against writing style. Finished. Thought story good despite everything.

I'm torn.

This book took me forever to read. FOREVER. (Six and a half months, according to Goodreads.) I kept putting it down for months at a time, in order to read books in which things actually, you know, happened.

But the thing is, I liked the writing itself. I'm trying to resist using the word “lyrical” because it's on the back cover but I just can't help it. There's an undeniable poetry to the language and the tone of the novel is truly lovely and unique, really evoking a strong sense of place.

So I found it very readable, when I was reading it. But then I'd put it down and realize I didn't care in the slightest what happened next. Each individual chapter flowed along nicely enough, but I had zero emotional connection to anything about this book.

The characters are passive, unlikeable and interchangeable; the actual plot points in the entire novel could be summarized on a 3x5 index card (and you wouldn't even have to write small); the narrative point of view shifts around pointlessly; the metaphors are heavy-handed and the overly-predictable ending is sticky with contrived sentimentality. It's not only a big letdown in terms of action, it's a disappointment if you're hoping for a big emotional payoff too: insofar as the relationships change over the course of the novel, it's in a very “things left unsaid” kind of way. And not an interesting, charged-with-tension kind of “things left unsaid” either. Just the ordinary kind.

I suppose I should give the book credit for telling a story of ordinary, flawed, wounded people stepping sideways and slowly into a second, truer love, and in it finding healing, but I got so bored just writing that sentence that I fell asleep. It also feels less like a story about that and more like a story that desperately wants to convince you (and itself) that it's about that, when in fact it's just a haphazardly strung-together series of vignettes that hand-waves at the above storyline, slaps a coat of metaphor on it and hopes you'll do all the work for it and then give it a Pulitzer.

Liked the movie - Loved the book.

As the jacket cover states it is “darkly comic,” exposing, at times, the darkest underside of human nature. The uplifting ending while not surprising is definitely not formulistic.

Proulx has interesting descriptive style that is both flowery and wordy but which never approaches cloying.

Here is a good example: “The North tilted to the sun. As the light unfolded, a milky patina of phytoplankton bloomed over the offshore banks along the collision line of the salt Gulf Stream and the brack Labrador current. The water crosshatched in complex layers of arctic and tropic, waves foamed with bacteria, yeast, daitoms, fungi, algae, bubbles and droplets, the stuff of life, urging growth, change, coupling.

To Roy

I really enjoyed the distinctive voice of this book. Quoyle (via Proulx) conveys so much with such terse little sentences. With a different narrator this might have been too sweet, but as it was, it was a quietly effective story about small towns and families and love and all that without being annoying.

I've read this one twice, the first time in 1994, then again 4 years later. It had an unusual writing style that took a little getting used to, then it grew on me. And the story is very interesting and full of quirky characters.