There’s seriousness, on a kind of sliding scale. It’s like snippets of Moby Dick, but with a wry twist. And it goes with the epigraphs of the chapters, quotations from sailors’ lore like a kind of literary chandlery. It’s effective because it matches the male, hands-on, working-for-a-living maritime world Quoyle washes up in. She goes in for no-nonsense clipped: stubby sentences that get down to business without wasting time on fancy stuff like verbs. But if Proulx is a comic writer (and I’m not absolutely sure she is), she does non-comic writing better. There’s something about the vulnerability of this oversized man who finds himself, after a life spent in go-nowhere jobs, booking into the motel from comedy hell, taking over an almost derelict ancestral house (more of that later) and ending up at a two-bit local newspaper staffed by human flotsam…. It’s the stuff of a particular brand of American comic writing, like Carl Hiassen: we don’t have to believe it, so long as we care.

Really, she’s only there to give Quoyle a hard time and to get herself killed so he can use the insurance money to get outta here. (Their daughters have pantomime names as well, but more of them in a minute.) In case we don’t get it, Proulx has her trying to sell the girls into slavery. Petal, the wife… well, let’s just say she‘s a pantomime monster to go with the pantomime name. Proulx doesn’t spend a lot of time on the joke of a marriage that lands him first with a no-good wife, then as a widower with young daughters. Emotionally, at the beginning of the novel at least, he’s stuck in a painfully self-conscious adolescence. Physically he’s a badly designed brick shit-house with a novelty chin.

Is it an entertainment, or does it have a serious purpose? Are these two mutually exclusive? I remember Quoyle from the first time because Proulx has made him memorable. I did, and I’m re-reading it to try and remind myself why I did. Mid-90s some time, when everybody read it and mostly seemed to like it. I can’t remember when I first read this novel either, easily her most successful. I can’t remember when she stopped calling herself E Annie.

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