But, while we, the readers, are not surprised that his life goes badly, we are certainly glad that the bottom comes quickly. You don’t want to know too much about him because you don’t want it to rub off on you.Įven worse than the worst stuff happens to him, of course. He’s everything that a person hopes that they are not. I wasn’t sure I could go through with this novel to begin with because I didn’t know that I wanted to spend that much time with such a pathetic, self-victimizing, paragraph of depression as him. We begin with a man named Quoyle who, in the outside world, is soggy and loathsome. Annie Proulx has convinced me of this world and the way she does it is so ultra clever. I would rather go to Newfoundland and eat flipper pie, work for a local newspaper full of typos and drive a boat to work than live in Manhattan and work for the New York Times. I am desperate to go to Newfoundland now, just desperate. The thing that will strike the reader most about The Shipping News is not the story itself, but the atmosphere of the book. I don’t read every book that I find in a free pile, but when three of my friends randomly came into possession of the same book, we decided to read it together. This week’s Retro Review is a book that I found in the free pile in my friend’s building’s laundry room. The name is probably obvious, but I’ll just say that Retro Reviews are reviews of old books that randomly come to me by word of mouth or pushy book-lenders.
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