Year: 1998
Type: book-review
Abstract: In the annals of journalism, Canadian or American, The Gammy Bird of Killick-Claw, Newfoundland, would occupy a lowly place, what with its narrow outlook, its ad-driven news, and its obsession with stories about sexual abuse and car wrecks.Nor would its ace reporter Quoyle, a refugee from upstate New York with nowhere to go but the ancestral rock on the sea from which his family fled a generation before, get any respect.Fired from one insignificant small-town newspaper, only to land on another still more obscure, and deserted by a faithless wife whose death not long after in a car crash left him a single, forlorn parent with two little girls, Quoyle laboured and suffered in his provincial backwater.His assignment was simply to log the comings and goings of ships in the Killick-Claw harbour and the pile-ups of cars on the roads and of boats at sea.Yet, from that small perch, the descendant of 'omaloors' -large, clumsy, witless folk, according to local lore -found his calling in the 'shipping news.'Instead of a dull routine of mindless fact, the post was Quoyle's lifeline.Bound to the bleak, stormbattered coast and its quirky, resilient people, he gained at once a profound sense of place and a practical grasp of its links to the larger forces -the collapse of the fishing fleet, the intrusion of oil tankers, the ups and downs of public projects -that refuse to leave even Quoyle's sanctuary alone.Down at the harbour, collecting the shipping news, Quoyle ties together the local and the cosmopolitan, and in the nexus, finds a way back into the world.I In that discovery, E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Shipping News (1993), offers a central theme for historians of
Author: Robert A. Gross
Institutions: William & Mary, University of Southern Denmark
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2292016185