Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew Up… in Newfoundland. She’s a true Killick-Claw local and is used to life in the remote, small town – though not all of her experiences have been pleasant there.
Living… with her young boy, Herry. Complications during Herry’s birth left him disabled and slower than the other children. After losing her husband years ago, Wavey’s son is her main priority in life.
Profession… caretaker at the local nursery school. Wavey has a lax, fun-loving approach to minding the children. She doesn’t mind letting children play freely, and doesn’t interfere very often. A new student’s father, Quoyle, remarks on this while making his first introduction: “Somebody really ought to be supervising them, don't you think?” “Yeah,” Wavey says. “Better get back to work. … I’m Wavey Prowse. I run the place.”
Interests… Newfoundland. Wavey is a Newfoundlander at heart. She likes the food, the people, and the land. She especially enjoys likes going on long walks with her son, Herry.
Relationship Status… widowed. Wavey seems happy enough raising her son alone, and isn’t overwhelmed by the task. Yet she does seem lonely. Her friendship with Quoyle, himself a single parent, seems more than platonic.
Challenge… overcoming the loss of her husband and allowing herself to love again.
Personality… helpful, thoughtful, and above all loving. Wavey is tall and quiet. Funnily enough, the first thing Quoyle notices is her posture. On a deeper level, Wavey is a kind, strong woman, capable of great care and love.
Get to Know her in...
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An emotionally-beaten man with his young daughter moves to his ancestral home in Newfoundland to reclaim his life.
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents). As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.
