Key themes
- The life rebuilt in a harsh landscape — and the community that permits it
- Quoyle's inadequacy as a surprising form of openness
- Newfoundland as character — its weather, its history, its indifference
About this book
Quoyle, a failed journalist in upstate New York, takes his two daughters to the remote Newfoundland coast where his family originated after his wife's death. Working for the local newspaper covering the shipping news, he slowly assembles a life from its wreckage. Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about renewal in a harsh landscape and the community that makes it possible.
Published in 1993, The Shipping News won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. Proulx spent considerable time in Newfoundland before writing it and has described the research as essential to the novel's texture.
Discussion questions
- Quoyle is famously unsuited to conventional heroism — large, clumsy, unprepossessing. How does Proulx make him compelling — and what does his receptiveness to Newfoundland allow?
- The chapters are headed with knot names and definitions. What does this structural choice add — and what does the metaphor of knots say about the novel's concerns?
- The Newfoundland community is rendered with extraordinary specificity. How does Proulx develop this place — as backdrop, as salvation, or as something that requires Quoyle to meet it on its own terms?
- The novel's treatment of sexual violence in Quoyle's backstory is handled with great brevity. How does Proulx use restraint — and does the brevity serve the subject?
- The Shipping News won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. What does it do that earns both?
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