The Shipping News is delightful. Proulx gives us a protagonist who is down on his luck, down on himself, and adrift at the whims of others—mostly in the form of a mean girl wife. When the wife dies and he loses his on-agin-off-again job, he reclaims the ground he has ceded. A life of sorts becomes available, and he claims it in pieces and parts, with increasing confidence and guided, always, by love and the need to be useful to those he loves.
I cheered, of course, but also, I fell in love with Proulx’s prose, her wit and wonder, and her beautiful way with words. Bonus for getting to read this while on vacation in a small maritime island town, though not nearly as far north as our protagonist.
