The Shipping News by Annie Proulx: what makes a home?
How to Read and Analyse a Novel: Analysing the House and Home
This post is part of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! With each book, we are taking a particular topic or theme and exploring its role in the novel; this allows for a reading which is both focussed and comprehensive, helping you hone your analytical skills. Today we are looking at the house/the home in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. For full introductory details and the reading list, start here. If you’d like to join but feel like you’re too late, please do—you can take this completely at your own speed, and I will continue to keep up with comments and thoughts on all the books we discuss.
Annie Proulx is the great chronicler of North American life, specifically the rural kind that is lived on a knife-edge, that exists on the cusp of change. Communities that rely on one industry—that have built whole ways of being on particular trades—are suddenly made vulnerable to the whims of nature, of climate change, of market forces far beyond their control. Such is the case with The Shipping News, Proulx’s sophomore novel that turned her into a literary star when it won the National Book Award in 1993 and the Pulitzer the following year. (It would also be an apt description of another book of hers I’ve read, That Old Ace in the Hole, too.)
The story goes that Proulx fell in love with Newfoundland first—an unusual place to fall for, for all its stark beauty—and decided to set a story there. Cue protagonist Quoyle, a bumbling doormat of a man, who after thirty-odd years in the States and one disastrous marriage that ends (literally) in a ball of flame, he decides to take himself and his two daughters to his ancestral home of Newfoundland. Thus begins an unusual, backwards kind of homecoming. Today we’re going to look more closely at the way Proulx dramatises this process for the reader.