The Lyrical Wonder of "The Shipping News" Quiz

Answer: American

Edna Ann Proulx is an American citizen, born in Connecticut USA of ancestors of English and French-Canadian descent. She lived in Vermont for 30 years earning a B.A. in history from University of Vermont and an M.A. from Montreal. "The Shipping News" was her second novel ("Postcards" was published in 1992).

She previously wrote a collection of short stories in 1988 and three non-fiction books. This dual nationality role is reflected in the book which starts in Upstate New York and ends in Newfoundland.

Answer: It is never revealed

Quoyle is not a physically attractive man, plus he had low self-esteem, "All stemmed from Quoyle's chief failure, a failure of normal appearance.". The author adds to this mental picture by comparing his physical characteristics to inanimate, utilitarian objects, "His chin was like a shelf". Proulx explains before the book has started that "Quoyle" is a coil of rope. Further into the book, she explains, "A Flemish is a spiral coil of one layer only. It is made on
deck, so that it may be walked on if necessary". This is the status of Quoyle in Chapter one. People walk all over him. Toward the end the transformation of Quoyle's personality, (given in the opening chapter) is complete. He is still Quoyle but now resembles the sturdiness or strength of rope, something in which you can trust.
Quoyle has no first name, that is given at least, throughout the book. Half of a name connects him to his family, but does not delineate him as an individual. When he becomes editor of the paper, he precedes his last name with two initials, a signal that he has established a sense of self (finally). Note in the context of re-location to start a new life, the family went to Newfoundland. (Newfoundland = New Found Land).

Answer: Man with broken family relocates to remote place, struggles, finds peace

Quoyle's wife runs off with her lover and her two daughters. His wife and her lover are killed, his two daughters returned. His aunt persuades him to relocate to their ancestral home in a remote part of Newfoundland to start afresh. Page 47 quotes, "the old place of the Quoyles, half ruined, isolated, the walls and doors of it pumiced by stony lives of dead generations".

Answer: Killick-Claw

All the options listed are knots. (All the chapters are named after knots). However the village on the Newfoundland coast is called Killick-Claw. The Quoyle House is situated on Quoyle Point, a place of steep cliffs, crashing seas and high winds. The house is cable-lashed to the cliff. At some point before Quoyle was born, the house had been dragged along the sea-ice from a neighbouring island.

Answer: The Gammy Bird

"The Gammy Bird" editor, Jack Bugget, asks Quoyle to cover the car accidents ("We run a car wreck photo every week, whether we have a car wreck or not. That's our golden rule." Page 65) plus the shipping news which are the boats and ships that come into the port, each with their own story.

Answer: Petunia Pickelthwaite

Tert Card is a one of Quoyle's colleagues at "The Gammy Bird" as is Nutbeam, a British ex-pat who goes by his surname (We only find out his first name from Tert Card). Agnis Hamm is Quoyle's aunt who persuades him to relocate to Newfoundland.

Answer: It made him face his fears: Death of Petal (car crash) and the fear of drowning

Page 49, "...did not want a boat, shied from the thought of water. Ashamed he could not swim, couldn't learn." By facing his fears through necessity, as to keep his job, he effectively had to write about these fears, Quoyle started to develop some resilience. This was the start of Quoyle's redemption.

Answer: "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" (1999)

In 1994 after 30 years of living in Vermont, Prouix re-located to Saratoga, Wyoming, a very much different part of the US. She wrote three books, all containing short stories, all prefaced in the title as "Wyoming Stories". "Brokeback Mountain" was from the first of these books. The other options are novels she wrote but none were as successful as "The Shipping News".

Answer: Wavey Prowse

Quoyle falls in love with Wavey Prowse. She has a son, Herry, with Down's Syndrome whom she loves dearly, which Quoyle notices as similar to the relationship he has with his own girls, Bunny and Sunshine. This final step, the falling in love shows the "healing" of Quoyle the man, and the last step away from Petal, his dead wife. (Cate Moore is a combination of Cate Blanchett who played Petal and Julie-Anne Moore who played Wavey, in the 2001 movie adaptation of the book).

Answer: True

In 1994 "The Shipping News" received the Pulitzer Prize and US National Book Prize. This was the first time that one book had won the two awards since "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole in 1981. These prizes were a just reward for, in my opinion, one of the greatest books of the 20th Century.