Bout 100 pages into it. Very enjoyable. It's interesting to go from Sideways, where the author/narrator is incredibly verbose to Shipping News, in which (and I don't know for sure if this is true of Proulx's work in general, though I get the impression that it is) the prose is bleak, stark and powerful; it flexes off the page at you. To quote a director I had once (though this was in reference to Theresa Rebeck), she writes like a man. That isn't meant in a derogatory or complimentary fashion; more as a descriptive term, as men and women do tend to have different styles.
Perhaps it is somewhat sexist to choose gender as a method of categorizing writers, so maybe I should qualify what I mean by "writes like a man": to me, Proulx's style feels very similar to Hemingway's. Compact and forceful as opposed to flowing and byzantine like Lovecraft (not that I've read any of his work; there's something I should add to my list of shit I have to read before I die). And yes, Lovecraft was a man (right?) so maybe the whole man/woman thing is stupid and I should just say she writes like Hemingway and me likey. Done, and done.
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