The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, published in 1993. Set initially in a small New York State town, it tells the story of Quoyle, a young man struggling to make a living as a reporter at the Mockingburg Record. Quoyle’s life is beset by a series of disasters – the suicide of his uncaring parents, marriage to a sociopathic woman who tries to sell their young daughters, before she dies in a car crash while fleeing to Florida with her latest boyfriend. Quoyle is used to enduring bad treatment, but even he is reeling. An aunt persuades him to make a new start in Newfoundland, ancestral home of the Quoyle family. He gets a job with The Gammy Bird, a local Newfoundland paper, writing up car crashes and shipping news. On this shaky basis, a better life begins to come together in a harsh but beautiful place.

Summarised like this, the events of Quoyle’s life sound gothically newsworthy, the sort of thing his newspaper bosses would love. To the man himself, he simply endures a series of horrible setbacks. Quoyle doesn’t have the confidence to believe his life deserves attention. And yet here we are reading about him. Will he come to believe that his story has value?

Settling in Newfoundland, Quoyle tries to get along. He covers a few dramatic stories, while personally leading a quiet life, looking after the children, renovating houses, going to the occasional riotous party, meeting Wavey, a young woman who seems to like him.

Quoyle’s life back in Mockingburg had been the stuff of tabloid headlines. His new girlfriend, Wavey, has herself escaped a potentially tabloid headline-grabbing relationship. Really their joint achievement in the end is not to become noteworthy in those garish terms, but to finally believe that they are both deserving of happiness. They don’t become the sort of people who might apparently be written about – but who wants that? Their non-story is better.

The Shipping News is a beautifully written novel, with much to say about the complex way stories work in our lives. In many ways we see the dark side of stories, the way they exaggerate, distort, and focus on the worst of humanity. But there is also a sense for the truth hidden in stories. For example, an imaginary white dog terrorises Quoyle’s daughter Bunny, appearing in her dreams, or in the shape of some random object she sees. Bunny makes drama out of nothing. And yet it is characteristic of The Shipping News that real and imaginary drama is hard to tell apart. Imaginary dogs take on something like reality when old Bill Pretty describes to Quoyle a myth linked to a dangerous rock on the Newfoundland coast, called the Komatik Dog.

“You come at it just right it looks for all the world like a big sled dog on the water, his head up looking around. They used to say that he was waiting for a wreck, that he’d come to life and swim out and swallow up the poor drowning people.”

While the story of the Komatik Dog is as fanciful as Bunny’s imaginary white dog, it reflects the real possibility of shipwreck. Silly, melodramatic stories need not be nonsense. They can hold a truth we would be wise to heed.