Celestial Navigation

I gave this strange little book 3 stars only because Anne Tyler is too good at her craft to give less. I suppose it can be taken as a study in agoraphobia. Or mismatched misfits. Or contemporary Faulkner. The multiple narrative technique and stream-of-consciousness prose reminded me a bit of Faulkner. But I found myself angry at the end, feeling I had wasted a good deal of my time trying to understand characters who went beyond the usual Tyler eccentrics to a place of incomprehension. I like and appreciate Southern women writers like Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor, so I am not against reading about oddball characters, but this was too much. I really couldn't believe that the two main characters, Mary Tell and Jeremy Pauling, ever really got together in the first place, much less had six children together. As described, Jeremy was someone a pretty young girl like Mary, no matter how desperate her straits, wouldn't touch with a barge pole. So that was the first area of disbelief. As it went on, I found myself thinking there had to be some kind of redemption for one or both characters. But there wasn't. So I would say, skip this and go to "Redhead on the Side of the Road" instead. A much better read, and more satisfying.

When an Anne Tyler novel doesn't work, her characters seem merely quirky and the book as a result seems charming but lightweight. At her best, though, her characters are genuine mysteries, but without any Gothic trappings. We're not in "Wuthering Heights" -- we're in the ordinary streets of Baltimore. Her fifth novel, "Celestial Navigations" (1974) is perhaps as good a novel of Tyler's as I've read -- and it's good by any standard. The title is apt -- celestial navigation is a nautical term for sailing by the stars. The things that you're steering by are real enough, but it takes real skill to negotiate them, and that's an apt metaphor for the difficulties of establishing relationships with people who are opaque to one another and who yet seem totally plausible as characters. The title perhaps suggests interstellar travel too -- and that suggests a sense in which these Baltimoreans are as weird as aliens at times to the people trying to understand them and love them.The central figure here -- the big mysterious planet into whose gravitational system the other characters come -- is Jeremy Pauling. Jeremy isn't deliberately trying to bring people into his orbit -- if anything the opposite is true -- but he has inherited a boarding house from his mother and it affords him income and that enables him to spend time creating works of art. Not that he has a commitment to "art": his work seems as much compulsive as creative, and he lives at a distance from, and is never sure how to negotiate, the social world of the boarding house, let alone the streets of Baltimore. Into the house comes Mary Tell and her four-year-old daughter Darcy. Only 23, she has left her marriage for another man, and the other man has proved unreliable. The usually recessive Jeremy is drawn to her, though he's 16 years older, and he has to try to learn how to behave in a way that earns her interest and (he hopes) affection. As the novel goes on, Mary in turn seems to become opaque too -- at first we think of her as a stereotypical sit-com-like character -- and the interactions of the two over a period of ten or eleven years is fascinatingly charted. The quality of the writing with which Tyler creates the interiority of her characters is distinguished -- it is both dense and fresh, but we never lose ourselves in it, and we never lose our sense of ordinary circumstances that prove anything but easy or ordinary for these particular characters -- and I'm talking about stuff as basic as eating and buying groceries. Of the wider "ordinary" world of politics and social change in an American urban setting, we hear next to nothing. And that's significant when the years covered by the novel are 1960-73.Of the ten chapters, six are told in the voices of characters. The four "Jeremy" chapters are told by an external narrator. As we learn more about Jeremy, we see that this is necessary, but that narrator hews so closely to Jeremy's consciousness that she never seems to be imposing or manipulating. And though Jeremy is an "artist," the novel isn't making a point about the oddness of artists -- the oddness is broader than that and finds an echo in the reader's consciousness too. Continuing the navigation metaphor, some wrong directions are taken; people go "off course" and have to be brought back, if they can be . . . and can they always? Tyler avoids a sentimental ending, and though it could be said to be an "open" one, it's a sober and pretty sobering open-ness that we're left with. Highly recommended.

I love every one of Anne Tyler's words. She scoops the breath right out of me. But I have to remember to beware. She is so tender with her characters, it's easy to get swept into her cavernous love for each of them–and once she's lured me into caring so deeply, I find myself wincing and wishing (begging?) that maybe this time around, she'll gift them more comfortable ends. I imagine she feels compelled to stay true to the trajectory of the lives she's traced for them. And even though she's slipped me into thinking they're mine, they're hers. She has every right to leave them where she chooses. I just have to be watchful after reading her. She can leave me in a little too much despair. She's a Master. I'm generally sodden for days.I love Anne Tyler–unbearably so. 10 stars for her gift. Subtract six for my depression and there's your four star review.

I read Celestial Navigation many years ago. It remains my favorite novel by my favorite contemporary author. It resonated strongly with me initially and continues to linger and haunt.I reread it recently (almost 30 years later) and still found it very powerful.When I first read it shortly after its publication, I was in the midst of a very sad divorce. While the characters in this novel are objectively very different from my ex and I, our emotional issues were painfully similar. Tyler gave me a way of interpreting my marriage in a way I had not before. So the book both moved me and was surprisingly helpful.

Having enjoyed Anne’s other books, I was disappointed to find this one difficult to finish and quite sad throughout. I’d skip this one had I known.

Enjoyed this novel very much.

All Anne Tyler's books are so well written and I thoroughly enjoy each read. Great character development and compelling story. I don't want to spoil it so won't say much more but at times it's just downright heartbreaking. Have you ever felt like crawling into the pages of a book and giving the character a swift kick in the butt? Well Jeremy is one of those characters. An observer of life. Completely inhibited. Sadly heartbreakingly so. Read!

Celestial Navigation is one of Anne Tyler's best. Right after I finished it, I couldn't wait to see what other Amazon readers thought of this novel, especially the ending. (NO, NO THERE MUST BE MORE!) was my favorite of the reviewer comments. I won't elaborate any more on that, but Tyler pulls no strings in this one. Raw reality when it comes to matters of the heart. Highly recommended!

Prior to reading this book, I had just finished a novel based on the South American drug war which was filled with sex, violence and foul language. I doubt if I could have found a greater contrast than "Celestial navigation." No sex, no violence and not one tiny swear word. Yet, this short book proved to be a delight. Though the author is well known, I had never read her work and I was "hooked" almost immediately. Her characterisation is both surprising and convincing. Her imagination is extraordinary since I cannot begin to understand the memories which she must have used to spin the story. The book is not chock full of laughs, indeed the overall mood is melancholy, but there are things to smile at. Two sisters dominate the first 30 pages and are then never referred to again. After a failed marriage, one of the two central characters - Mary- moves into a boarding house in Baltimore and befriends Jeremy, a reclusive and introverted artist. The book is about their relationship which is, to say the least, strange. Tyler paints other characters into her landscape and they all make a contribution to the overall picture. The story ends abruptly and untidily but I am pleased to have read it.A book created by a woman who knows her craft and practices it well.

Pushes the boundaries of believability just a bit too far for me. Relentlessly dreary, lacking in any comic interludes. I have read and enjoyed several of Anne Tyler’s novels,but not this one.

Then his impulse of non-Jeremyish bravery with the bus map … and if I tell you where he went, and with what clumsy difficulty and blinkered determination he made this journey, and whom he visited, and what their or his reactions were, and what he did there for them — all that would be sacrilege on my part, in case you accidentally read about it here before reading it in this incontrovertibly great book. A book that I have managed to get round to before it became too late.Suffice to say, there were ‘surprise’ whistles, and the winterizing of windows by stuffing equivalents, I guess, to his artwork installation ingredients into new frames!Not forgetting his possibly foolhardy trip on a dinghy to ‘air the sails’ of a boat…The detailed review of this book under my name is too long or impractical to post here, and the above is one of its observations.

Mary is portrayed as a capable, sensible, warm, homely person and yet she ‘marries’ a weird, emotionally repressed wimp of a man - on a whim. I don’t think so! If it was for financial stability or to ‘mother’ him, then why would she not return to him at the end when she cannot provide for the six children she has by then? And why is it titled Celestial Navigation? For the life of me, I cannot see the connection.I have read three other Anne Tyler novels and although they do meander along a bit aimlessly, they do give you a sense of time and place and you do get to know the characters well. However, for me, the main characters in Celestial Navigation were totally unbelievable, and the secondary characters such as Jeremy’s sisters, Miss Vinton and particularly Olivia, added nothing to the story.On average I read a book every two weeks , and have done so for 10 or 15 years. But I only review those I have especially enjoyed or disliked. Unfortunately this falls in the latter category. I wish I had abandoned it, but I pressed on thinking that some insight would be revealed by the end - but it was not to be!Sorry about the spoilers, but I wouldn’t advise you to waste time reading it.

I have become accustomed to Anne Tyler’s style of writing in almost self contained chapters which though seemingly unconnected , usually make up a whole satisfying story.However In “Celestial Navigation “ I became intrigued by the changes of narrator and time but eventually found myself longing for a resolution which never really happened. Perhaps I missed something.