SOURCE: Scofield, Sandra. “Harbors of the Heart.” Washington Post Book World (1 August 1993): 5.

In the following positive review, Scofield evaluates the strengths of The Shipping News, calling the novel “wildly comic.”

Here is Quoyle, with a giant's chin and “a casement of flesh.” He stumbles from unloving family to unwelcoming world, falls into newspapering, walks around his trailer asking aloud, “Who Knows?” Marries badly—Petal Bear, “thin, moist, hot,” who warms him, “as a hot mouth warms a cold spoon,” but thinks of him as “a walrus panting on the pillow.” Never mind. He clings: two daughters, “six kinked years of suffering,” until Petal and a lover take a wrong turn, end up dead. All in 28 pages.

Unlikely material for a romantic comedy, but E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News is, doubt not, a wildly comic, heart-thumping romance. Here is a writer who, in a room with Robertson Davies...