SOURCE: Whitworth, John. “Was Love Then a Bag of Sweets?” Spectator 271, no. 8630 (4 December 1993): 40–41.

In the following review, Whitworth offers a negative assessment of The Shipping News.

Much American scorn has been poured on the European Art Film which improves and uplifts on government money, but conspicuously fails to entertain. It is curious, then, that America appears the natural home of the Art Novel, the self-referential productions of Barth, Donleavy, Vonnegut and Pynchon if you like them long, or Brautigan and Kesey, born out of Kerouac, if you like them short and equally pretentious.

What strikes one about much American writing from very early on (good writers too—Melville, Poe, James, Nabokov) is how intent its practitioners are on making it new, pushing back the boundaries of prose etc, and causing the reader to sweat a bit. Each one means to reinvent narrative, rather than refine on something already...