Sherry Chandler

The Shipping News

Let’s see. Used to say there was four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman. It was just a thing he said. I don’t know what it means.

I was born politically incorrect: white, southern, female, daughter of Southern Baptist tobacco farmers. On top of that, my forefathers fought for the Confederacy. As far as I know, no one in my family ever owned a slave but that’s a technicality. It’s still a demographic that puts me way out on the fringe of my social peers of choice.

What is more, I am somewhat unrepentant, unwilling to repudiate my family. Though I would not do now what they did then, I have no wish, through the wisdom of my hindsight, to call them evil, to shake the dust of their sins from my righteous sandals. To do so would seem like apologizing for who I am and that’s not an easy thing to do.

Which may explain why I identify so strongly with Quoyle, the protagonist of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (Scribner, 1993). He found redemption not by denying his past, because he didn’t know he had one, but by discovering and immersing himself in it.

When the novel opens, Quoyle, a fat and shambling man with a huge chin and no-color eyes, lives in Mockingburg, New York. He’s spent a lifetime being bullied by his father and his hateful older brother. He’s underemployed as a newswriter for The Mockingburg Record and miserably married. A man almost completely ineffectual, he is compared in the chapter head note to the Flemish Flake (see photo), described in the Ashley Book of Knots as

a spiral coil of one layer only. It is made on deck, so that it may be walked on if necessary.

Quoyle is not just passive, he’s also self-deluded. A sort of shadow Walter Mitty, he creates fantasies in which his demon lover of a whoring wife, Petal, loves him and he has some sort of family life with her and his two daughters, Bunny and Sunshine.

All of this misery comes crashing to a cataclysmic halt with, in quick succession, the joint suicide of Quoyle’s parents and his wife’s accidental death in a car crash. Oh yes, and he gets fired. Again. Quoyle is flattened completely.

Enter deus ex machina in the form of his long-lost and stout-hearted aunt Agnis. Having dropped by to pick up her brother’s ashes, she invites him to come along with her to the family homeplace in Killick-Claw, Newfoundland.

In this place of harsh weather and harsher history, Quoyle slowly discovers his roots, a family whose sins included shipwrecking (by placing false beacon lights), rape, incest, and child molestation. His family was so bad that their neighbors drove them out of their home on Gaze Island, so that they put their house on skids and pulled it across the bay on winter ice. They re-established it on Quoyle’s Point, a promontory so rocky and wind-blown that they had to anchor the house down with huge cables.

Quoyle tries to help the aunt reclaim this house that has been standing empty for 40 years and in doing so overcomes a lifetime of fears and develops a certain competence. He gets a job writing the shipping news for the Killick-Claw weekly The Gammy Bird and meets “the tall and quiet” woman, Wavey Prowse, whom he desires but with whom he can’t quite connect. He acts as the catalyst to heal the past of his aunt and the future of his daughters.

That Quoyle’s redemption comes as a result of embracing and taming his inner brigand is made clear in the film of The Shipping News. In it, Quoyle takes part in the bacchanalian destruction of his friend Nutbeem’s boat, an event that echoes the wrecking practiced by his ancestors.

Nutbeem is a fellow reporter who has built a Chinese junk himself and plans to sail it to South America and a warm and easy life. It is at his farewell stag party that the locals work themselves into a drunken frenzy and, claiming they want to make Nutbeem stay, take axes to his boat and sink it. Still crazy from this destruction, Quoyle staggers drunkenly to Wavey’s house and assaults her.

Wavey repulses Quoyle easily enough and he sleeps it off on her couch.

The next night Quoyle goes out through a great storm, a storm that washes him clean, and approaches Wavey in gentleness. She accepts him and, in the night, the storm breaks the heavy cables of the past and blows the unhappy Quoyle house away.

Things are not quite so neatly symbolic in the novel. In it, Quoyle doesn’t participate actively in the boat’s destruction and, wandering away from the melee, he only peers somewhat wistfully through Wavey’s window into her warm and lighted kitchen.

In the novel, what happens to Quoyle the next day is that he discovers his cousin Nolan, the last of the old-time Quoyles, living in squalor in a hut near the Quoyle house. Nolan turns out to be the ghost who has haunted Quoyle’s daughter Bunny, perhaps the maid in the meadow, and who has been leaving witch-knots on their doorstep to drive them away. Quoyle has traced Nolan to his lair to confront him, have it out. Instead

In the man before him, in the hut, crammed with the poverty of another century, Quoyle saw what he had sprung from. For the old man was mad, the gears of his mind stripped long ago to clashing discs edged with the stubs of broken cogs. Mad with loneliness or lovelessness, or from some genetic chemical jumble, or the flooding betrayal that all hermits suffer. …Quoyle could not shout at him, even for the witch-knots in his daughters’ footsteps, even for the white dog that had terrified Bunny. Said, “You don’t need to do this.” Which meant nothing. And he left.

Shortly thereafter, Quoyle sees that Nolan is taken care of in a clean and warm modern nursing home and the cousin supplies him with the last key to unlock his past.

I like this ending better because, when the cleansing storm comes and the cables of the past are broken, the old unhappy house is blown away by an act of compassion. It is not in turning away from his past that Quoyle is healed of its wounds, wounds he didn’t even know he had, but by discovering first that he needs a little bit of that wildness and then by looking at the sins of the past with unflinching but gentle and forgiving eyes.

Thus the knots of the past are unraveled but, as head note to the final chapter, taken from The Ashley Book on Knots, reminds us:

There are still old knots that are unrecorded, and so long as there are new purposes for rope, there will always be new knots to discover.

I’ve gone on long and totally failed to capture the charm and humor of this book. The old house may be tied down with cable but the prose is light, the characters quirky and funny. I haven’t mentioned the way the villagers reach out to their returned prodigal. Or how Quoyle sums up his life in headlines: Reporter Licks Editor’s Boot, Man Sounds Like Fatuous Fool.

Being a comedy, the novel ends with all snarls unsnarled and couples coupled with the mooring hitch, of which The Ashley Book of Knots says:

The merit of the hitch is that, when snugly applied, it will not slip…

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Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 Belles Lettres, Netflix adventures Trackback URL for this entry