This is one novel where I'm reasonably sure the film version outshone the book -- and by a lot. The movie, after all, had Judi Dench and Kevin Spacey. Spacey may have been revealed to be a total prick, but he can act.
For that matter, it's obvious Proulx can write when she wants to, but she decided to craft a decidedly odd book when she wrote this novel. This was another one of those books where the reviews for it left me wondering if the reviewers and I had read the same novel. Professional reviewers did a lot of blathering about comic elements while referring to aspects of the book that struck me as profoundly sad. The main character Quoyle is a poor schmuck of a lifetime loser, a fellow who was raised in what was obviously a totally dysfunctional family, isn't particularly good looking, has trouble finding and keeping a job, and ends up married to a sociopath. He kind of blunders through life with only one friend to speak of. And we're supposed to be amused by him? I must have missed something.
It gets really dark and strange before anything remotely upbeat happens. His sociopath of a wife leaves him, taking their two young daughters with her and her current boyfriend. The wife and boyfriend die in a traffic accident, but not before the wife sells the two little kids to a pervert who plans to use them in kiddie porn. Not a whole lot of comic elements in that particular section of the book unless, of course, one finds the notion of two small naked children covered with dish soap sliding around on a kitchen floor while the pedophile tries to figure out how to work his new camera amusing.
Quoyle gets his kids back, his aunt whom he'd never met before shows up because his parents died (suicide pact), and the aunt persuades him to pack up and move to Newfoundland, the land of his ancestors. The first couple chapters describing Newfoundland made it sound as though anyone who lives there is either truly desperate or too dumb to leave. It is not an inviting province. The family home (which apparently they have a legal claim to, despite no one having lived there for several decades)(I found myself wondering just who was paying the property taxes for all the years it sat there abandoned) is not fit to live in so they end up stuck in a motel that is overpriced and filthy. Then the aunt's dog dies. Can it get worse, one wonders? Short answer: yes.
Our Hero, such as he is, is hired as a reporter by a local newspaper. His standard assignments are to cover the shipping news (report on what freighters have arrived in port, where they're from, and when they're leaving) and traffic accidents. The paper's publisher wants suitably gory accident scene photos for the front page. Descriptions of Quoyle's new work milieu are, to say the least, bizarre.
I usually don't look at reviews much after I've read a book. This one was an exception. As noted above, the professional reviewers, the ones who get paid for their prose and often have academic training in "literature," thought it was great. They loved it, thought it was a masterpiece.
People commenting from the perspective of book club members or just ordinary readers were less sanguine than the literati. They found Proulx's writing style confusing and choppy, an assessment I agree with. There are flashes, a sentence or a paragraph here and there that light up a page, but overall? It is not a good sign when my reaction to a novel is "this chick needs a good editor." You know, every time I read a book that seems awkwardly constructed I find myself remembering a story about James Joyce. Supposedly when Joyce was complimented on creative elements (odd spellings, strange sentence constructions) in his work he confessed that they weren't intentional. He was just a terrible typist and never had been good at spelling. I always wonder just how much of what's on a page is what the author actually intended and how much is the result of a copy editor being afraid of stepping on the author's voice by cleaning up gross errors in grammar. Editing, after all, is an art, a balancing act, and some authors handle being edited better than others.
So, overall assessment of The Shipping News? Not an easy read, and a remarkably depressing one for most of the book. I'll give it a 5. It's not horrible, but for sure I didn't enjoy reading it.
Next up: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shield. Another work and author I've never heard of. It is also, of course, one that requires an Interlibrary Loan request.
didn't they make a movie out of it too?
ReplyDeleteYes, with Kevin Spacey, Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore, and Judi Dench. A talented cast, but I'm not curious enough to go looking to see if it's available through streaming.
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