SOURCE: DeMont, John. “An Epiphany on the Rock.” Maclean's (25 April 1994): 57.

In the following review, DeMont offers a positive assessment of The Shipping News.

When Vermont writer E. Annie Proulx first visited Newfoundland in the mid-1980s, she was searching for new rivers and lakes in which to dip her canoe paddle. “The moment I arrived I experienced this visceral feeling,” she told Maclean's, speaking by phone from her small, book-filled house situated on 17 acres of Vermont hillside. “Newfoundland was meaningful to me in a very profound way which I can't really explain.” Well, she certainly took a decent stab at it in The Shipping News, her moving, witty novel about an American newspaperman who experiences a similar epiphany in Newfoundland. Earlier this year, it won an American National Book Award and The Irish Times International Prize for fiction. And last week, it captured another honor—the 1994 Pulitzer Prize...