My streak of Eastern Canadian literature continues this week with The Shipping News. Annie Proulx is technically an American author but this is certainly one of the best known fictional depictions of Nova Scotia, so it counts. When I picked up Who Will Run the Frog Hospital I didn't even realize what a strong French-Canadian connection it had, so this year has been highlighted with two really wonderful trips to Ontario and Quebec and tons of accompanying Canadian literature to support it, and most of it accidental.
What is there to say about a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award? It is objectively "good" in every sense of the word, although her prose style is so different from what I expected. I suppose I was anticipating a kind of spare, bleak, post-Hemingway prose style (where did this idea come from? Was it because of the 'Brokeback Mountain' dialogue?) but instead it feels more reminiscent of her American contemporaries like Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon (no shade), and maybe even a bit of Vonnegut.
I've been thinking a lot lately about masculine vs. feminine writing styles, and wondering if anyone can tell the difference. This is mostly inspired by the Elena Ferrante situation -- a reclusive and very talented Italian woman author who many think is secretly a man, presumably because her writing is so excellent). Can anyone really tell the gender of the author by their prose? I think Annie Proulx is proof that gender assignment to writing style is complete baloney; her writing shares more stylistically with her male contemporaries, and if I had read it without knowing the author, I would have guessed the gender wrong.
Which I suppose is the point of an exercise like #ReadWomen2014 -- readers should make every effort to enjoy books written by men and women, and good literature should be good literature, not "good literature...for a woman." To get back to Annie Proulx then, and her many prizes, it seems likely that The Shipping News would have to be perceived to be such a literary accomplishment as to surpass those of Proulx's male contemporaries, whose work is often given attention, praise and prizes such much more readily. And for me, it has lived up to every bit of that hype and probably deserves a bit more.