Excerpt from The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
The Shipping News is one of my favorite novels and Annie Proulx is one of my
favorite writers, so it was not hard to find a well-written passage in this book. What was
hard was narrowing it down to one.
I chose this particular passage because it captures one of my worst nightmares:
being stuck in a decrepit, disgusting motel for a night. Proulx gives her reader a sense of
place through vivid diction, and although what she describes is horrible, there is a
humorous tone in the passage.
The back story for this section is simple. A storm has hit and the protagonist,
Quoyle, his aunt and his two small children are forced to spend the night in the only place
around, The Tickle Motel Bar and Restaurant.
Proulx begins the passage with a description of the parking lot filled with "...long
distance rigs, busted-spring swampers, 4WD pickups, snowplows, snowmobiles" so
we can see that the place is "jammed." The lot is not full of import sedans, mini-vans or
sports cars; through her list of vehicles Proulx tells us the type of folks who are also
staying at the motel - not a family-oriented crowd.
Note: This is a "swamper":
We know that the family is in for a long night when they are greeted with a clerk
who has "inflamed eyes" . He tells them he only has the "Deluxe room and bridal
suite" for $110.00 a night, a suite in which he claims the former Canadian prime minister
had once slept. Proulx inserts a dramatic short sentence, "He had them over a barrel"
to indicate how powerless Quoyle and his family are in the situation. She also
foreshadows later in the paragraph when Bunny, one of the daughters, breaks the wings
off her new cheap toy before they even leave the lobby.
Proulx allows the reader to see and feel the room using figurative language to
further develop the idea of cheap and dirty. The walls are illuminated from passing cars
"like raw eggs in oil."
There is humor when the aunt quips that the Prime Minister must have "slept in
his suit" when they discover that their "deluxe" room doesn't even have a coat closet.
My favorite paragraph is when Quoyle takes a shower. It's both funny and gross.
Again, Proulx's use of imagery is vivid: "Discolored water spouted from a broken tile,
seeped under the door and into the carpet. The sprinkler system dribbled as long
as the cold faucet was open. His clothes slipped off the toilet lid and lay in the flood,
for the door hooks were torn away. A Bible on a chain near the toilet, loose pages
ready to fall. It was not until the next evening that he discovered that he had gone
about all day with a page from Leviticus stuck to his back."
And the night gets even worse.
Dinner is as disturbing as the room. The simile Proulx uses to describe the
atmosphere is original, funny and graphic: "The dining room, crowded with men, was
lit by red bulbs that gave them a look of being roasted alive in their chairs." Later
she describes Quoyle as having "gobs of tartar sauce on both knees" - again funny but
gross.
Back in the room, Proulx appeals to our sense of sound and feel to describe the
rest of the night, which is reminiscent of a haunted house attraction at a carnival. "The
rooms on each side of them raged with crashings, howling children. Snowplows
shook the pictures of Jesus over the beds. The wind screamed in the ill-fitted
window frames," followed by the scariest part of all, when the doorknob breaks and the
other half falls outside trapping them in the room.
Bunny quips, "This is like a war."
Although there is no thematic value to this section of The Shipping News, Annie
Proulx writes about a situation most of us have feared and, hopefully, have never
experienced - the filthy motel room. When a writer can create a setting so vivid that it
makes the reader squirm, that's good writing.