SOURCE: Flavin, Louise. “Quoyle's Quest: Knots and Fragments as Tools of Narration in The Shipping News.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40, no. 3 (spring 1999): 239–47.

In the following essay, Flavin discusses the symbolic imagery of knots and fragmented language in The Shipping News, drawing attention to their use in the novel to develop thematic aspects of individual and interpersonal disconnection, entanglement, bonding, and integration.

Annie Proulx's first two novels have garnered an impressive number of awards. For Postcards, she received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the first time a woman had won the prize; and for The Shipping News, Proulx was awarded the National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Award, and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize. Although the list of awards is distinguished, some reviewers have been less than favorable, most often when commenting on her writing style. One reviewer writes: the “sinuousness of E. Annie Proulx's prose seems...