Preview of The Shipping News Summary:

As a bildungsroman, the novel builds the main character as he moves from one world to another. While those worlds contrast with one another, they are also interrelated. The contrasts are of south to north (the United States to Canada), Quoyle's unnatural urban life of the early novel against nature holding sway over human interactions in Newfoundland, and the dysfunctional with the functional family. The contrasting worlds are not separated along two distinct lines; they overlap. In fact, they are lashed together by the interconnectedness which comes from the unfolding of human lives and the dependencies of one world upon another.

Unlike the typical bildungsroman, The Shipping News is the story of a man whose life begins in a world in which the trappings are those of a late twentieth-century expose. It is a world which seems totally devoid of innocence, peopled by a brother who is meanness...