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 themand 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 Tylerunbearably so. 10 starts for her gift. Subtract six for my depression and there’s your four star review.

Having enjoyed Annes other books, I was disappointed to find this one difficult to finish and quite sad throughout. Id skip this one had I known.

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.

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