He has not had any great success in love (his wife only loved him for one month) or a career (besides working as a cashier for a 24/7 bodega, Quoyle has worked as a “third-rate newspaperman.” Feeling that he has no control over his life, he decides to return to Newfoundland, Canada where his ancestors are from. Quoyle(pronounced “QU-yle”) is a 36-year-old man born in Brooklyn and raised in various small, boring towns in upstate New York. The third person omniscient story begins with a quick description of Quoyle, the novel’s protagonist. Each chapter opens with a quote from The Ashley Book of Knots(1944), an encyclopedia of knots and knot patterns. Its themes include enduring family secrets and the curative powers of small-town life. It has been praised for its quirky humor and detailed sense of character.
It is one of a handful of novels that won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. (Mar.American author Annie Proulx published The Shipping News in 1993. She is in her element both when creating haunting images (such as Quoyle's inbred, mad and mean forbears pulling their house across the ice after being ostracized by more God-fearing folk) and when lyrically rendering a routine of gray, cold days filled with cold cheeks, squidburgers, fried bologna and the sea. Already picked himself for godfather''-but her terse prose seems perfectly at home on the rocky Newfoundland coast. Proulx routinely does without nouns and conjunctions-``Quoyle, grinning. But the novel is much more than Quoyle's story: it is a moving evocation of a place and people buffeted by nature and change. to recover from the terrors of their past lives.
Killick-Claw may not be perfect, but it is a stable enough community for Quoyle and Co. There, Quoyle finds a job writing about car crashes and the shipping news for The Gammy Bird, a local paper kept afloat largely by reports of sexual abuse cases and comical typographical errors. The fulcrum is Quoyle, a patient, self-deprecating, oversized hack writer who, following the deaths of nasty parents and a succubus of a wife, moves with his two daughters and straight-thinking aunt back to the ancestral manse in Killick-Claw, a Newfoundland harbor town of no great distinction.
Proulx has followed Postcards, her story of a family and their farm, with an extraordinary second novel of another family and the sea.
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