At the beginning of "The Shipping News" we meet Quoyle and his friends in Mockingburg. Quoyle worked in the family paper"Mockingburg Record", which specialized in "fawning anecdotes of local business people, profiles of folksy characters in addition to puzzles and contents, syndicated columns, features and cartoons". Mockingburg is a big community, characterized as a suburb of New York. E. Annie Proulx describes it on page ten as " a place in its third death. Stumbled in two hundred years from forests and woodland tribes to farms, to a working class city of machine tool and tire factories. Along recession emptied the downtown, killed the malls. Factories for sale. Slum streets, youth with guns in their pockets, political word rattle of some litany, sore mouths and broken ideas". In Mockingburg Quoyle "abstracted his life from the times". He hardly had any friends, and the few he had did not care enough to give him what  he needed; love. People in a place like Mockingburg do not establish personal contact like people in a small place. The reason might be because many of them move after a while or maybe just because they care for themselves, their family and their jobs, and do not have time for other people. Quoyle managed to ignore the problems and the people in the world behind him, problems like terrorism, mass murders, cancer, AIDS, climatological change, suicides and other things that comes with a large place. People knew what was going on around them in Mockingburg, but did not care as long as it did not affect them. Quoyle was not different, he did not care - until he had to, when his parents and his wife died. Quoyle had to face problems he had never experienced, and he was "waiting for his life to begin" at a new place , with new people, new sights and new values.

Agnis, Quoyle's aunt persuaded Quoyle and his two children Bunny and Sunshine, to move with her to Newfoundland, to a place called Killick-Claw. Agnis Hamm was fifteen when she had moved from Quoyle's point at Killick-Claw, but she had no difficulty in remembering it; "the rough weather, the sea's hypnotic boil, the smell of blood, weather and salt, fish heads, spruce smoke, the rattle of wash ball rocks in hissing wave, turrs, the crackery taste of brewis, the bedroom under the eaves" (p.33). The book gives us a feeling that she had moved from the isolation. She had been alone in the hidden coves with the contoured thoughts. She had escaped from the desperation and the "rough hands" to the United States when she was seventeen. Now she wondered what had changed the most, the people or the place itself. She characterize Killick-Claw as a strong place (p.34).

When they arrived at the old place of the Quoyles it was half ruined, isolated, and the walls and the doors of it pumiced buy stony lives of dead generations. The house was in such a bad shape that they could not stand there until they had repaired it. Compared to the trailer Quoyle had lived in Mockingburg this was much worse. Quoyle got a job at the local newspaper "The Gammy Bird". "Gammy Bird" was a hard bite, looked life right in its shifty bloodshot eye. Quoyle felt he did not know the rules, it was nothing like "Mockingburg Record" - he did not know how to write this stuff.

Killick-Claw was a big contrast to Mockingburg. Killick-Claw was a small community. The news was on everybody's lips. People knew about the car accidents, the boat wrecks, suicides, and child abusers. They did not only know that it happened, they also knew who it happened to.
People knew everything that was going on. It was not only gossip but people cared in another way that they did in Mockingburg. People care more for their neighbors and friends at a small place. If something happen to people they know friends, neighbors and family will try to help out, give them psychological support or help them out with practical things. They do not not have the conscience to not care. People who do not care are rude and not welcome in such a community.

Quoyle became more of a father and a better writer at Killick-Claw. His part of life seemed richer and he could expose true feelings. He knew he could help people if they needed him and he knew he could get help if he needed to. He had found a place that gave him the security and love he needed. He had got new friends, a new girlfriend, and a good job at this place. he did not need the city life, he liked the silence, the rough sea and weather, the smell of fish and all the stories. Quoyle did not miss the "asphalt life" and what comes with that.

At the end of the book we can read the change in Quoyle, Proulx writes "Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliance's, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunset, heard music in the rain", and he fell in love. Quoyle fell in love with the place, the people and Wavey.