Celestial Navigation

Anne Tyler’s characters are always weird and quirky, but they are also mostly lovable and worth rooting for. I reached for this book because I needed something lighter, happier, more positive than the books I have been reading lately, and wouldn’t you know, this is the one Anne Tyler that just doesn’t give you that.

Jeremy Pauling, the main character of Celestial Navigation, suffers from agoraphobia. He is afraid to leave his house, he trembles and shakes and collapses if he makes it farther than the end of the block. He has lived with his mother all of his life in a home that serves as a boarding house. Her death means changes for Jeremy, and therein lies our story.

He is an artist, and I believe we are meant to think he is show more special, and this is where Tyler generally excels, but with Jeremy I think she fails. I did not love him. I found him far too self-centered and clueless to the needs or feelings of others.

When his agent, Brian, talks of a boat he has purchased, he says he intends to said her by celestial navigation, and Jeremy is awed. His boarder thinks, “Oh, Jeremy, I wanted to tell him, you too sail by celestial navigation and it is far more celestial than Brian’s.” I knew exactly what Tyler wanted me to think of Jeremy, but, alas, it was not what he came across as through his thoughts or actions.

So, I was disappointed and not cheered up by the quirkiness of this character. I may have exhausted my love for Anne Tyler as I have exhausted her literary canon, but I’m glad to have made her acquaintance and it is with sadness that I say goodbye. show less

Having grown accustomed to the jaunty humour of Anne Tyler's later novels, what was most striking about Celestial Navigation was its pervasive sense of sadness. As a character study of child-like artist Jeremy Pauling, it is honest, realistic and heart-breaking.

I suspect many families (including mine) harbour a 'Jeremy' - the coddled son who has drifted into a rudderless and ineffectual adulthood, indifferent to the needs of other people. What stopped me despising Jeremy outright was Tyler's focus on what his favoured status has cost. As his sister Amanda reflects, 'Well, there are worse things than walking alone. Look at Jeremy, propped up on both sides, beloved son of Wilma Pauling. If that is what love does to you, isn't it possible show more that I am the most fortunate of all?' (p. 40)

This is still very recognisable as a Tyler novel, dwelling as it does on the workings of a single Baltimore household over the course of many years. The author also makes effective use of multiple narrators to explore different phases of Jeremy's life. Celestial Navigation is amongst Tyler's best work. show less

Tyler's writing is excellent, and her story oddly interesting and disturbing at the same time. She describes the world of an artist, a place which can be extremely irritating to share, and his uniqueness which, frankly, is a great burden for everyone. This unconventional story about strange people shows how things can and cannot work at the same time, how people search and find themselves, and get lost once again. The storyteller switches from one character to another, back and forth, and shows how isolated and different from each other they are and what it means to be truly lonely - out of this world, so to speak.
P. 58 The people I love are scattered, there is no way of gathering them snugly together where I can keep watch over them.
P. show more 202 He was wishing that I would shrink a little. He never guessed that I already had shrunk, that this was as small as I could get. show less

A sad book, i guess I'd say......hard to pinpoint. Lots and lots of things unsaid bring unhappiness to the members of a very quirky family. Tyler does that part brilliantly....creating these bizarre characters that you somehow cannot help but root for......yet this one just left me sad. An unlikely pair, Jeremy and Mary, try desperately to create a nuclear family, yet they never have a chance due to the remarkably unstable Jeremy; in the end there are 5 children and a step-daughter...... A lot of characters, many points of view, and a lot of sadness in my view.....but i kept rooting for them. Do not know if my coolness to this is the book itself, or my own disappointment at the ending. Either way, I did not love it or hate it.....it show more just left me sad....... show less

Jeremy Pauling is an artist with some severe mental health issues. I'm not a diagnostician, but I'm pretty sure he's living with depression, anxiety and agoraphobia at the least. Mary Tell is a woman at loose ends after having left her husband and being installed in Jeremy's boarding house by her lover, who comes to see her less and less.
The reader is privy to the inner monologues of these characters, but their communication skills are so poor that they continue to behave in ways that hurt and reject the efforts of the other to make connection. They won't swallow pride and say how they feel. They are afraid to look weak in front of each other and their facades of strength build walls between them.
As a reader, I kept screaming at them show more to JUST TALK TO EACH OTHER. It was infuriating. I wasn't a particularly big fan of either character and actually came to like them less as the book went on. Also, spoiler alert, I really didn't like the ending.
I suppose one could view this as a cautionary tale. I didn't really care for it. show less

I haven't read Anne Tyler in many years and I'd forgotten two things: 1) how she loves a stagnant, constantly perplexed male character and 2) how she can break your heart slowly and gently. I took away one star just because Jeremy was so tentative he was unrealistic. I mean, I've met dryer lint with stronger personalities. But the writing was lovely as always and the undertone was just the right amount of sad.

I didn't quite understand the title of the work and how it related to the story (though there was an attempt to explain it--I think--within the pages of the novel). Tyler seems to like writing about the loners or those who don't quite fit in with the rest of society--at least in the few books of hers I've read. I do not read much literary fiction as a general rule.

Jeremy Pauling is an artist who exists mostly in his own world and who prefers not to leave the few block radius around his house. He's aided in this first by his mother and later by Mary, who starts out as a boarder and ends up being his companion. He takes Mary for granted to some extent and ends up losing her--not realizing what he had until she's gone.

The ending was a bit show more unsatisfying for me--I wasn't quite sure if he just decided that Mary didn't want him anymore and walked away without a fight, or if he was just too proud to tell Mary that he wanted her back and she too proud to return to him unless she heard him ask, or if she really did tell him she didn't want to return to his house with him. show less