¶ … Shipping News In her novel The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx brings to life a Newfoundland fishing town and a small group of its inhabitants - a more-or-less failed journalist and the three women in his life - his two daughters and his aunt. The four of them have decided to retake their ancestral home, and the action of the plot derives from this attempt - both literal and psychological - to reclaim history. The story that results is certainly not a happy one, even the ending seems to be happy.

With this novel, Proulx seems to be providing us with a reworking of that axiom we have all heard: You cannot go home again. Home may be the place that that have to take you in when you have to go there, but you will have forgotten how to speak the language, and the food will no longer satisfy you and there will be alarming noises in the night. You may be able to overlook these things for a time, but eventually you will realize that the only way we can live our lives is by stepping each day into the future.

As noted above, Proulx's warning about the impossibility of never being able to go home again is hardly a novel one, and yet we find ourselves engaged in her story at least in large part because we believe that this time the moral of this oft-told tale just might be different.

One of the most engaging aspects of this book is Quoyle, more or less the hero of the book, more or less its protagonist. He is someone who has in many ways failed to make the kind of

He is not exactly looking for a fresh start, for his experiences have told him that such a thing is not possible, at least for someone like himself. But he is hoping to become someone who has a place in the world. Since he has been unable to carve such a place for himself, he returns, literally as well as metaphorically, to the place of his ancestors.
And yet, he is so ineffective in his life that we see that even by the end of the novel - despite all of his trying - he is still not quite up to the tasks of everyday life, as good-hearted and well-meaning as he might be. This passage from Chapter 39 suggests both at how hard he tries and how ill he succeeds:

His old tweed jacket was too small as well. In the end he gave up and pulled on the enormous oxblood sweater he wore everyday. It could not be helped. But would have to buy a new jacket next day for the funeral. Get it in the morning in Misky Bay when he took the paper in to be printed. Tying his good shoes when Wavey called and said Bunny had something to ask.

It should be noted that the characters in the novel are hardly static: It is not the case that they do not or cannot change. But Quoyle at least cannot succeed at making those changes that he needs to. In the end he may believe that love can sometimes occur without "pain or misery," but this is hardly a happy-ever-after ending.

Proulx herself intended the ending to be at least bittersweet, as she said in an interview she gave to The Atlantic Monthly in which she analyzed the book. Quoyle settles for…