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Celestial Navigation
Thirty-eight-year-old Jeremy Pauling has never left home. He lives on the top floor of a Baltimore row house where he creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. His elderly mother putters in the rooms below, until her death. And it is then that Jeremy is forced to take in Mary Tell and her child as boarders. Mary is unaware of how much courage it takes Jeremy to look her in the eye. For Jeremy, like one of his paper creations, is fragile and easily torn--especially when he's falling in love....
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1974
277 people are currently reading
2,308 people want to read
About the author
Anne Tyler
121books8,232followersAnne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. She has published 20 novels, her debut novel being
If Morning Ever Comes
in (1964). Her eleventh novel,
Breathing Lessons
, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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March 2, 2025
Jeremy Pauling is living in a Bizarro World.
You may remember Bizarro, in the DC Comic book story Superman. I certainly do, as Bizarro premiered when I was only 9 years old, and I was by then fatally addicted to comics.
Not all of us can become a Superman. But Superman’s archenemy Lex Luthor thinks he can recreate Superman - and his scheme, of course, as all evil schemes eventually will be, is foiled.
Luthor inadvertently creates an amoral, twisted monster. Bizarro is in it all for his own glory - he is his own gnostic Daemon - and so, like Luthor, Bizarro bends reality in his daemon’s twisted image.
So his is a Bizarro world.
And this is Jeremy Pauling’s world.
In it, all abiding Value has been “de-�, or “trans-valued� in the Nietzschean sense. Bizarro’s efforts are worthless to God. And so are Jeremy’s. But not so his soul. No, for he is a transmogrified innocent at heart.
Jeremy’s simple world as a child with Asperger’s Syndrome was annihilated when he put two and two together. And no, it’s not his fault. The Daemon’s toolbox is just too sophisticated for him.
But then the unlikeliest of apparitions of Grace is given him.
You know, we seldom make use of our Graces. That is the business of our Faith. Without at least a modicum of it we are ALL at sea. Faith would give Jeremy the grit he needs to face the world at least obliquely head on.
But like many of us he refuses it, cause it’s not his Thing.
And so - Enter the Daemon....
With more bait.
The world thinks Jeremy’s “found (ie worthless) art� - a Dadaist term for the modern art form that sprang, fully formed, from the side of Surrealism when it merged with Abstract Expressionism - is pure genius.
His art becomes priceless in the world’s eyes.
But guess again.
It’s not Jeremy’s art. It’s his Daemon’s ignoble way of reconciling him to a transvalued cruel world, a world to which the Bizarro nobility of nonsense constructions gives Jeremy new strength.
So he becomes a Superman manque of alienation, and in the end his isolation is terminal. But he still remembers how to make sense of the world on a basic and ingenuous level.
His art becomes a hidden language, reverberating in the callous world’s postmodernist soul.
It’s like in Simon and Garfunkel’s Only Living Boy in New York:
Half of the time we’re gone
But we don’t know where -
We don’t know where...
But Jeremy knows.
Did that ever happen to you? Me too.
But that’s Jeremy ALL the time.
He’s trapped in his aborted and alienated Asperger’s world and can’t get out. Except through his neutral, amoral Daemon.
We are actually no better than our neighbours, sub specie aeternitatis -
The Being of God ultimately knows no distinctions.
Jeremy’s way out is actually only a way further into myopia. And he refuses to transmute his Asperger’s Syndrome into the transient gold of everyday, common reality.
No wonder that among her own novels, this is one of Anne Tyler’s favourites!
We ALL share Jeremy’s blindness to our faults. That dysfunction is our humanity.
We’re duped - myself as well. And nowadays, we’re duped by the Daemon of technology into thinking we’re somehow more well-adjusted than we really are.
If we - you and me - can just continue to do our best to stay alert and awake to what is actually happening to us, on the inside and outside, in every moment (a VERY tall order, believe me) we just might smash the Daemon’s illusions and see the clear light of the everyday world - and find Peace, more and more of the time.
But Jeremy, like so many of us:
would rather be ruined than changed.
(He) would rather die in (his) dread
Than climb on the cross of the moment
And let (his) illusions die.
And Jeremy, unchanged at the end, is still ruined. Though NOT unhappy in his ruin.
But there IS a way out of this postmodern dilemma: Jeremy has to make the plunge and OWN his Daemon, in an act of sacrifice. It’s The Hard Way.
It’s what the mightily disturbed Cliff does in R.J. Ellis� unsung Masterpiece, Behind the Spiritual Lines.
As an act of love, Cliff BECOMES his snarling Daemon - peacefully.
And so, his Cross is his redemption -
As it must be for US:
And the ONLY way to Postmodern Peace.
You may remember Bizarro, in the DC Comic book story Superman. I certainly do, as Bizarro premiered when I was only 9 years old, and I was by then fatally addicted to comics.
Not all of us can become a Superman. But Superman’s archenemy Lex Luthor thinks he can recreate Superman - and his scheme, of course, as all evil schemes eventually will be, is foiled.
Luthor inadvertently creates an amoral, twisted monster. Bizarro is in it all for his own glory - he is his own gnostic Daemon - and so, like Luthor, Bizarro bends reality in his daemon’s twisted image.
So his is a Bizarro world.
And this is Jeremy Pauling’s world.
In it, all abiding Value has been “de-�, or “trans-valued� in the Nietzschean sense. Bizarro’s efforts are worthless to God. And so are Jeremy’s. But not so his soul. No, for he is a transmogrified innocent at heart.
Jeremy’s simple world as a child with Asperger’s Syndrome was annihilated when he put two and two together. And no, it’s not his fault. The Daemon’s toolbox is just too sophisticated for him.
But then the unlikeliest of apparitions of Grace is given him.
You know, we seldom make use of our Graces. That is the business of our Faith. Without at least a modicum of it we are ALL at sea. Faith would give Jeremy the grit he needs to face the world at least obliquely head on.
But like many of us he refuses it, cause it’s not his Thing.
And so - Enter the Daemon....
With more bait.
The world thinks Jeremy’s “found (ie worthless) art� - a Dadaist term for the modern art form that sprang, fully formed, from the side of Surrealism when it merged with Abstract Expressionism - is pure genius.
His art becomes priceless in the world’s eyes.
But guess again.
It’s not Jeremy’s art. It’s his Daemon’s ignoble way of reconciling him to a transvalued cruel world, a world to which the Bizarro nobility of nonsense constructions gives Jeremy new strength.
So he becomes a Superman manque of alienation, and in the end his isolation is terminal. But he still remembers how to make sense of the world on a basic and ingenuous level.
His art becomes a hidden language, reverberating in the callous world’s postmodernist soul.
It’s like in Simon and Garfunkel’s Only Living Boy in New York:
Half of the time we’re gone
But we don’t know where -
We don’t know where...
But Jeremy knows.
Did that ever happen to you? Me too.
But that’s Jeremy ALL the time.
He’s trapped in his aborted and alienated Asperger’s world and can’t get out. Except through his neutral, amoral Daemon.
We are actually no better than our neighbours, sub specie aeternitatis -
The Being of God ultimately knows no distinctions.
Jeremy’s way out is actually only a way further into myopia. And he refuses to transmute his Asperger’s Syndrome into the transient gold of everyday, common reality.
No wonder that among her own novels, this is one of Anne Tyler’s favourites!
We ALL share Jeremy’s blindness to our faults. That dysfunction is our humanity.
We’re duped - myself as well. And nowadays, we’re duped by the Daemon of technology into thinking we’re somehow more well-adjusted than we really are.
If we - you and me - can just continue to do our best to stay alert and awake to what is actually happening to us, on the inside and outside, in every moment (a VERY tall order, believe me) we just might smash the Daemon’s illusions and see the clear light of the everyday world - and find Peace, more and more of the time.
But Jeremy, like so many of us:
would rather be ruined than changed.
(He) would rather die in (his) dread
Than climb on the cross of the moment
And let (his) illusions die.
And Jeremy, unchanged at the end, is still ruined. Though NOT unhappy in his ruin.
But there IS a way out of this postmodern dilemma: Jeremy has to make the plunge and OWN his Daemon, in an act of sacrifice. It’s The Hard Way.
It’s what the mightily disturbed Cliff does in R.J. Ellis� unsung Masterpiece, Behind the Spiritual Lines.
As an act of love, Cliff BECOMES his snarling Daemon - peacefully.
And so, his Cross is his redemption -
As it must be for US:
And the ONLY way to Postmodern Peace.
June 10, 2022
Jeremy Pauling is quirky.
Quirky?
Yes.
Agoraphobic, too.
On the spectrum?
Yes, something like that.
Some call him a genius; some think he's mad, this artist who's also the unlikely landlord of a boarding house filled with loners, spinsters and students.
Jeremy lives on one of the many side streets of Anne Tyler's Baltimore, a fictional world that she's created that feels more precious to me than the most darling of miniature train set boards, decorated for Christmas.
In all of Ms. Tyler's Baltimore, Jeremy Pauling may have the highest perspective. He has confined himself to the attic of the house where he has had an aerial view of life, rather than a close acquaintance, and this is reflected in his art, which seems to be the work of crows, patchwork mosaics made from scraps and shiny items.
Wasn't there anything to lift him out of this stillness inside?
Jeremy has learned to stumble through his life using celestial navigation: the act of finding one's way by observing the sun, moon, and stars.
He's so unusual, you feel, intuitively, as a reader, that he'll never fall in love, never leave the house, never have children or a traditional career.
But, we forget how often we are able to fill in the blanks with other people, whether our lives then make complete sentences or not.
I feel like I can squint my eyes and imagine my idol, Ms. Tyler, in a long, 70s skirt, looking dreamy, mind filled with this story. I can almost see her stepping, delicately, into an oily puddle, right in the center of one of her fictional streets, to extend a hand to lift up her beloved residents with a majesty that their shabby lives so often betray.
If Jeremy Pauling had been created by a misanthrope, I'd surely hate him. He was dreamed up, instead, by one of our most creative and compassionate writers. I went from being repulsed by Jeremy, to feeling as though I could completely understand him.
His life, he thought, was eye-shaped—the tight pinched corners of childhood widening in middle age to encompass [his wife] and the children, narrowing back now to this single lonely room.
Quirky?
Yes.
Agoraphobic, too.
On the spectrum?
Yes, something like that.
Some call him a genius; some think he's mad, this artist who's also the unlikely landlord of a boarding house filled with loners, spinsters and students.
Jeremy lives on one of the many side streets of Anne Tyler's Baltimore, a fictional world that she's created that feels more precious to me than the most darling of miniature train set boards, decorated for Christmas.
In all of Ms. Tyler's Baltimore, Jeremy Pauling may have the highest perspective. He has confined himself to the attic of the house where he has had an aerial view of life, rather than a close acquaintance, and this is reflected in his art, which seems to be the work of crows, patchwork mosaics made from scraps and shiny items.
Wasn't there anything to lift him out of this stillness inside?
Jeremy has learned to stumble through his life using celestial navigation: the act of finding one's way by observing the sun, moon, and stars.
He's so unusual, you feel, intuitively, as a reader, that he'll never fall in love, never leave the house, never have children or a traditional career.
But, we forget how often we are able to fill in the blanks with other people, whether our lives then make complete sentences or not.
I feel like I can squint my eyes and imagine my idol, Ms. Tyler, in a long, 70s skirt, looking dreamy, mind filled with this story. I can almost see her stepping, delicately, into an oily puddle, right in the center of one of her fictional streets, to extend a hand to lift up her beloved residents with a majesty that their shabby lives so often betray.
If Jeremy Pauling had been created by a misanthrope, I'd surely hate him. He was dreamed up, instead, by one of our most creative and compassionate writers. I went from being repulsed by Jeremy, to feeling as though I could completely understand him.
His life, he thought, was eye-shaped—the tight pinched corners of childhood widening in middle age to encompass [his wife] and the children, narrowing back now to this single lonely room.
August 31, 2024
“I don’t know which takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.�
This book broke my heart and mended it so many times that my heart is literally aching 💔❤️�
This story was told from multiple POV. We are first introduced to the family by Amanda, in Fall of 1960. At this time their mother has just passed away. At this point in the book we are introduced to Jeremy. Jeremy is a childlike 38 year old bachelor that never left home. In fact, he struggles to walk outside of the front door. He lives with his mother, spending his days creating ‘pieces� of art which are really just cutting up bits of coloured paper and sticking them together into a collage.
In their mother’s will she left a note to the girls saying: “Please take care of him. Please see to it that he doesn’t just go to pieces. I have thought a long time about what he should do, and I wondered if he would go to you girls but I don’t suppose he will. He still won’t leave this block, you know.�
After this initial shock, of the mother’s death, at the start of the book, the story was really quite slow moving after that and I found myself getting bored by the second chapter. There were however, occasional nuggets of interesting information which kept me going.
However, shortly after Mary Tell becomes a new boarder in the house. And this is where it all changes for Jeremy; a MAJOR turning point! She would become his rock even if she believed ‘He would be a rock of strength for her.’�
Despite Jeremy being terrified of many things including: ‘using the telephone, answering the doorbell, opening mail, leaving his house, making purchases. Also wearing new clothes, standing in open spaces, meeting the eyes of a stranger, eating in the presence of others, turning on electrical appliances.� - to name a few 😅 He very quickly fell head over heels for Mary Tell.
Jeremy thought he knew how things worked, thanks to the multitude of magazines and TV shows he studied. First you set up the courtship; he had just done that. Then there were certain requirements to be met—holding hands, a kiss—before he could propose. And that he would do�
‘Why, that man would move heaven and earth for her! You have only to look at him to see how much he loves her.� 🥹
As a reader, falling in love seems so out of the question for Jeremy that when Mary not only enters his life, but doesn’t make a quick turn around, it is a shock. A pleasant one at that. My heart was so full and I was genuinely happy for this chap.
I’m not going to continue to give away the plot because that’s what reading the book is for. But I will say Mary sticks around for a good while wink 😉 yet both himself and Mary both dream of: ‘Sitting alone in a room reading a book, with no one to interrupt me. That is all I ever consciously wanted out of life.�
Will love be strong enough to break his habits of a lifetime? Would love fail Jeremy, or was it Jeremy fail love? Was there anything to hope for after love?
People come, people go…but in the end the house, itself, comes full circle. All the while Jeremy is trying to navigate through life using celestial navigation; the act of finding one’s way by observing the sun, moon and stars �
The last few chapters 🥺 I did not expect�
🌟🌟🌟🌟
This book broke my heart and mended it so many times that my heart is literally aching 💔❤️�
This story was told from multiple POV. We are first introduced to the family by Amanda, in Fall of 1960. At this time their mother has just passed away. At this point in the book we are introduced to Jeremy. Jeremy is a childlike 38 year old bachelor that never left home. In fact, he struggles to walk outside of the front door. He lives with his mother, spending his days creating ‘pieces� of art which are really just cutting up bits of coloured paper and sticking them together into a collage.
In their mother’s will she left a note to the girls saying: “Please take care of him. Please see to it that he doesn’t just go to pieces. I have thought a long time about what he should do, and I wondered if he would go to you girls but I don’t suppose he will. He still won’t leave this block, you know.�
After this initial shock, of the mother’s death, at the start of the book, the story was really quite slow moving after that and I found myself getting bored by the second chapter. There were however, occasional nuggets of interesting information which kept me going.
However, shortly after Mary Tell becomes a new boarder in the house. And this is where it all changes for Jeremy; a MAJOR turning point! She would become his rock even if she believed ‘He would be a rock of strength for her.’�
Despite Jeremy being terrified of many things including: ‘using the telephone, answering the doorbell, opening mail, leaving his house, making purchases. Also wearing new clothes, standing in open spaces, meeting the eyes of a stranger, eating in the presence of others, turning on electrical appliances.� - to name a few 😅 He very quickly fell head over heels for Mary Tell.
Jeremy thought he knew how things worked, thanks to the multitude of magazines and TV shows he studied. First you set up the courtship; he had just done that. Then there were certain requirements to be met—holding hands, a kiss—before he could propose. And that he would do�
‘Why, that man would move heaven and earth for her! You have only to look at him to see how much he loves her.� 🥹
As a reader, falling in love seems so out of the question for Jeremy that when Mary not only enters his life, but doesn’t make a quick turn around, it is a shock. A pleasant one at that. My heart was so full and I was genuinely happy for this chap.
I’m not going to continue to give away the plot because that’s what reading the book is for. But I will say Mary sticks around for a good while wink 😉 yet both himself and Mary both dream of: ‘Sitting alone in a room reading a book, with no one to interrupt me. That is all I ever consciously wanted out of life.�
Will love be strong enough to break his habits of a lifetime? Would love fail Jeremy, or was it Jeremy fail love? Was there anything to hope for after love?
People come, people go…but in the end the house, itself, comes full circle. All the while Jeremy is trying to navigate through life using celestial navigation; the act of finding one’s way by observing the sun, moon and stars �
The last few chapters 🥺 I did not expect�
🌟🌟🌟🌟
February 11, 2013
Sad people are the only real ones. They can tell you the truth about things; they have always known that there is no one you can depend upon forever and no change in your life, however great, that can keep you from being in the end what you were in the beginning: lost and lonely, sitting on an oilcloth watching the rest of the world do the butterfly stroke.
There's a something that you can have because you gave it to someone, a kind of grace or willing warmth. Something of you to light on someone else, be kinder. There's the view of another that is in spite of someone else. I was between these two feelings about Celestial Navigation.
By the way, that three stars is a 3-4 stars. I'm not sure yet. There were times I hated it. I read this book at the worst time. I was already gut feeling like I wanted to step out of my own body and be anyone else. Even that would be too late because every step was missed. Doomed to watch people on the street and giving them something I wish I had. It didn't feel good. I read Celestial Navigation in my car that I drove to a neighboring parking lot on work lunch break after some coworkers teased me about rocking out in my car (with threats to video and put up on youtube). I finished it in the library and could hardly concentrate because I didn't get to read it in one of my three favorite spots. I was conscious of what I was doing as a part of this phobic world. Building meaningless walls of habit. Embarrassment is its constant. In spite of is its hope, although I hardly had any. If my 3-4 stars changed to a scab I'd pick at it right now and gross everyone out. I don't know. My goodreads buddy Sean asked me to read this so I read it (personal story time a public school teacher purchased an Anne Tyler for the class library just for me in an attempt to reach out. I rebuffed her. Unless you count that Accidental Tourist audio book read by John Malkovich this is also a chance to make up for that past guilt). I'm certain to disappoint to share it through my eyes. They turned their eyes away. That's what I want to do!
Amanda speaks first I imagine to protect Jeremy from further scorn by virtue of her outsized hate. The way a person will put themselves down first so that you won't do it, and you probably wouldn't have. Everything about them feels like that. It isn't really hate. It's more of a resentment and refusal to accept him for who he is. I guess if anyone had the right to try to get the agoraphobe out of the house it would be his sister, though. My guess is if she didn't the popular tact would have been the opposite. Everyone knows what is best for everyone else. I felt for the Latin teacher spinster who didn't get to hide from the world in her mother's bosom or in the womb slash apartment building they bury in for decades. She hears the preemptive insults in her head same as him. She lies down in her bed and remembers everything that she has ever lost. I like that we meet Jeremy this way first. He will not move for anyone. I guess it says something about me that I mentally compared him to others who would not be lucky enough to inherit a home to hide away in forever. [His amazing luck to win nearly every minor contest ever was kinda lame. I am developing an allergy to magical realism shit this late in my life.]
A young art student with no prospects of the female persuasion gives the social cues for Jeremy to assure her that she cannot be rejected forever. Jeremy knows he misses all of the social cues. Jeremy must always be the beneficiary of another's grace. He dreams a courtship that must have come from some magazine hoarded away from some year where... I don't know. His courtship ritual made no sense to me. Jeremy has a fantasy land that doesn't have a lot of layers in Shrek's onion. I felt for him when the object of his affection, the already a Mrs. Mary suspects him of manipulating his landlord position for sexual favors. Jeremy doesn't live in a world where that sort of thing happens. That is appealing in its own way until you realize he doesn't live in a world where anything happens. It's an escape to something and then you're on an island with fuck all to do. What did he think was going to happen once they got married?
Mary creeped me out when she tells in one of her perspectives that her natural state is being pregnant. I couldn't have been more icked out by that, actually. Until they have seven kids to go with the one she already had. I could see Mary as the star of any number of Lifetime network tv films. They start out with a dim but sweet woman who just met a nice fella. You take the story from there based entirely on what kind of guy that fella happened to be. Jeremy doesn't live in a world where anything happens. He won't pick up a telephone, he won't leave the house, he will not move. He will stare helplessly at his daughters and wonder why they do not call him Papa. When his sister Amanda tries to force him like ripping off a band aid he wills himself to die. She thought of her brother as a guy who is thoughtless, always sick. Thoughtlessly sick, I think. Could be a hypochondriac or the symptoms could be the bodies way of fighting off never living. He will always have a cold. He could die one day and he will always have a cold. He will not come to the phone and he will not ask his daughters to call him Papa. That island has a father's day, I bet. Jeremy as the center of the tootsie pop of life's licks was pissing me off, actually. He wasn't the only one!
I don't know how it happened that Mary fell in love with Jeremy. She needed someone and she was already a mother to Darcy. Here's another kid. That makes me embarrassed to picture them making love. When you hear about someone like Jeremy would you wish for them to find happiness? Would you think about what it cost for that other person? I couldn't smile when she relents to his walled marriage proposals. That's her cage, and not freeing to him either. When she leaves him it is a plot point in one of her movies. Not a door open it's a page turning to another page, same story. She left another husband and this time it is like a point b already written to happen. You know your lines why don't you speak them? If Jeremy would speak the lines she wants to hear she would come home to him with his children. I know that in her she needed him to move. How can you live with a person you must breathe life into? He was a mama's boy, all right, always needing to be given birth. Jeremy would envision his mother's death and it would kill him like one of his phantom illnesses. Something to be wrong with. Mary leaves and the words do not occur to him. It's just something that is wrong with him.
The young girl in their building falls in love with Jeremy. I can imagine she's hypnotized by the void but really I have nothing. I forgot to describe Jeremy. He is pear shaped, doughy, filling in. You would be his chair and he would sit in you. Before long you would have a Jeremy sized indentation from his weight. The neighbors swear he's an albino because his eyes are colorless. What do they see? The old lady in the building who gave up all of her songs by choice won't say a peep about it (I feel sorrier for Amanda still. Her only crime, if it is a crime to not love unconditionally someone who could never do the same for you). She swears that Jeremy sees them all with celestial navigation. I'm reminding of talking about Joy Division and touching from a distance. There's a kinship in Celestial Navigation about this kind of touching. Only I don't feel it in Jeremy other than the most shapeless of dreams. He wants to want it and then it will be there. Like one of his paper collages. Some he cannot finish. What would he do with them? Maybe sell one? I would want to scream if I had to look into his colorless crawl space for too long. Didn't he love anyone enough to wake up? Why did he break down and die on the street if he had to go past further than where he had already been? That one block. That one grocery store where he will die meekly asking for day old pies. Touching as a shadow on the fall that fades out at the top of the ceiling. I was moved when he wanted and then it faded out within me.
I get it, kinda. I could be afraid to not leave the house. I don't really want to talk about that feeling. It gets easier to be that way if you've already been doing it. I don't want to talk about it because I don't look down to not do it. It is easy in the end when Jeremy is still in that house. It's not easy because it's the sick you're used to. You could study a medical dictionary and say you had those symptoms and build your life around it. I can't leave the house. So don't leave the house. Everyone leaves me, he says. He was never there for anyone else and he never asks it. I can't get over this feeling that Jeremy was a baby and not a real person. Is it easier to love babies than real people? I don't think so. He watches television and maybe those eyes move to go what does this have to do with my little world. Exactly. It was the kind where you have to live with them in spite of them. My celestial navigation wanted a real person and I wonder if I would have done anything if I knew Jeremy. Leave him in his house. You can't go in there with him or you'll be sick.
I like the way that Tyler describes the people. I wish I hadn't read this over the past couple of days, and immediately following Housekeeping: a novel that would whisper to me on the bridge to "Jump!" and all of the gray echoes you would have missed if you had any light temptations. I wanted it and then I felt shame. The temptation to go around giving stuff to people and it's not the knowing people for real in spite of yourself way that truly matters. I could be Jeremy as he misses his cues and never wants to try again. But he wouldn't try and I would and I just wish it wasn't so easy to fall into patterns of self disgust when you hadn't done anything wrong. I wish I could write about this book in "my eyes" like Sean asked but I don't want to feel the shame of not belonging. I don't know if I ever saw Mary and Jeremy other than a warning sign.
There's a something that you can have because you gave it to someone, a kind of grace or willing warmth. Something of you to light on someone else, be kinder. There's the view of another that is in spite of someone else. I was between these two feelings about Celestial Navigation.
By the way, that three stars is a 3-4 stars. I'm not sure yet. There were times I hated it. I read this book at the worst time. I was already gut feeling like I wanted to step out of my own body and be anyone else. Even that would be too late because every step was missed. Doomed to watch people on the street and giving them something I wish I had. It didn't feel good. I read Celestial Navigation in my car that I drove to a neighboring parking lot on work lunch break after some coworkers teased me about rocking out in my car (with threats to video and put up on youtube). I finished it in the library and could hardly concentrate because I didn't get to read it in one of my three favorite spots. I was conscious of what I was doing as a part of this phobic world. Building meaningless walls of habit. Embarrassment is its constant. In spite of is its hope, although I hardly had any. If my 3-4 stars changed to a scab I'd pick at it right now and gross everyone out. I don't know. My goodreads buddy Sean asked me to read this so I read it (personal story time a public school teacher purchased an Anne Tyler for the class library just for me in an attempt to reach out. I rebuffed her. Unless you count that Accidental Tourist audio book read by John Malkovich this is also a chance to make up for that past guilt). I'm certain to disappoint to share it through my eyes. They turned their eyes away. That's what I want to do!
Amanda speaks first I imagine to protect Jeremy from further scorn by virtue of her outsized hate. The way a person will put themselves down first so that you won't do it, and you probably wouldn't have. Everything about them feels like that. It isn't really hate. It's more of a resentment and refusal to accept him for who he is. I guess if anyone had the right to try to get the agoraphobe out of the house it would be his sister, though. My guess is if she didn't the popular tact would have been the opposite. Everyone knows what is best for everyone else. I felt for the Latin teacher spinster who didn't get to hide from the world in her mother's bosom or in the womb slash apartment building they bury in for decades. She hears the preemptive insults in her head same as him. She lies down in her bed and remembers everything that she has ever lost. I like that we meet Jeremy this way first. He will not move for anyone. I guess it says something about me that I mentally compared him to others who would not be lucky enough to inherit a home to hide away in forever. [His amazing luck to win nearly every minor contest ever was kinda lame. I am developing an allergy to magical realism shit this late in my life.]
A young art student with no prospects of the female persuasion gives the social cues for Jeremy to assure her that she cannot be rejected forever. Jeremy knows he misses all of the social cues. Jeremy must always be the beneficiary of another's grace. He dreams a courtship that must have come from some magazine hoarded away from some year where... I don't know. His courtship ritual made no sense to me. Jeremy has a fantasy land that doesn't have a lot of layers in Shrek's onion. I felt for him when the object of his affection, the already a Mrs. Mary suspects him of manipulating his landlord position for sexual favors. Jeremy doesn't live in a world where that sort of thing happens. That is appealing in its own way until you realize he doesn't live in a world where anything happens. It's an escape to something and then you're on an island with fuck all to do. What did he think was going to happen once they got married?
Mary creeped me out when she tells in one of her perspectives that her natural state is being pregnant. I couldn't have been more icked out by that, actually. Until they have seven kids to go with the one she already had. I could see Mary as the star of any number of Lifetime network tv films. They start out with a dim but sweet woman who just met a nice fella. You take the story from there based entirely on what kind of guy that fella happened to be. Jeremy doesn't live in a world where anything happens. He won't pick up a telephone, he won't leave the house, he will not move. He will stare helplessly at his daughters and wonder why they do not call him Papa. When his sister Amanda tries to force him like ripping off a band aid he wills himself to die. She thought of her brother as a guy who is thoughtless, always sick. Thoughtlessly sick, I think. Could be a hypochondriac or the symptoms could be the bodies way of fighting off never living. He will always have a cold. He could die one day and he will always have a cold. He will not come to the phone and he will not ask his daughters to call him Papa. That island has a father's day, I bet. Jeremy as the center of the tootsie pop of life's licks was pissing me off, actually. He wasn't the only one!
I don't know how it happened that Mary fell in love with Jeremy. She needed someone and she was already a mother to Darcy. Here's another kid. That makes me embarrassed to picture them making love. When you hear about someone like Jeremy would you wish for them to find happiness? Would you think about what it cost for that other person? I couldn't smile when she relents to his walled marriage proposals. That's her cage, and not freeing to him either. When she leaves him it is a plot point in one of her movies. Not a door open it's a page turning to another page, same story. She left another husband and this time it is like a point b already written to happen. You know your lines why don't you speak them? If Jeremy would speak the lines she wants to hear she would come home to him with his children. I know that in her she needed him to move. How can you live with a person you must breathe life into? He was a mama's boy, all right, always needing to be given birth. Jeremy would envision his mother's death and it would kill him like one of his phantom illnesses. Something to be wrong with. Mary leaves and the words do not occur to him. It's just something that is wrong with him.
The young girl in their building falls in love with Jeremy. I can imagine she's hypnotized by the void but really I have nothing. I forgot to describe Jeremy. He is pear shaped, doughy, filling in. You would be his chair and he would sit in you. Before long you would have a Jeremy sized indentation from his weight. The neighbors swear he's an albino because his eyes are colorless. What do they see? The old lady in the building who gave up all of her songs by choice won't say a peep about it (I feel sorrier for Amanda still. Her only crime, if it is a crime to not love unconditionally someone who could never do the same for you). She swears that Jeremy sees them all with celestial navigation. I'm reminding of talking about Joy Division and touching from a distance. There's a kinship in Celestial Navigation about this kind of touching. Only I don't feel it in Jeremy other than the most shapeless of dreams. He wants to want it and then it will be there. Like one of his paper collages. Some he cannot finish. What would he do with them? Maybe sell one? I would want to scream if I had to look into his colorless crawl space for too long. Didn't he love anyone enough to wake up? Why did he break down and die on the street if he had to go past further than where he had already been? That one block. That one grocery store where he will die meekly asking for day old pies. Touching as a shadow on the fall that fades out at the top of the ceiling. I was moved when he wanted and then it faded out within me.
I get it, kinda. I could be afraid to not leave the house. I don't really want to talk about that feeling. It gets easier to be that way if you've already been doing it. I don't want to talk about it because I don't look down to not do it. It is easy in the end when Jeremy is still in that house. It's not easy because it's the sick you're used to. You could study a medical dictionary and say you had those symptoms and build your life around it. I can't leave the house. So don't leave the house. Everyone leaves me, he says. He was never there for anyone else and he never asks it. I can't get over this feeling that Jeremy was a baby and not a real person. Is it easier to love babies than real people? I don't think so. He watches television and maybe those eyes move to go what does this have to do with my little world. Exactly. It was the kind where you have to live with them in spite of them. My celestial navigation wanted a real person and I wonder if I would have done anything if I knew Jeremy. Leave him in his house. You can't go in there with him or you'll be sick.
I like the way that Tyler describes the people. I wish I hadn't read this over the past couple of days, and immediately following Housekeeping: a novel that would whisper to me on the bridge to "Jump!" and all of the gray echoes you would have missed if you had any light temptations. I wanted it and then I felt shame. The temptation to go around giving stuff to people and it's not the knowing people for real in spite of yourself way that truly matters. I could be Jeremy as he misses his cues and never wants to try again. But he wouldn't try and I would and I just wish it wasn't so easy to fall into patterns of self disgust when you hadn't done anything wrong. I wish I could write about this book in "my eyes" like Sean asked but I don't want to feel the shame of not belonging. I don't know if I ever saw Mary and Jeremy other than a warning sign.
March 4, 2020
As usual, this was a perfectly enjoyable read because Anne Tyler's writing is so comforting; it's like a warm blanket. She creates these worlds in her stories that feel very inhabitable. Although her characters and the plot-lines toe the line of eccentricity that is a tad unbelievable. But that's the novelty of her story-telling. Is this the most memorable of her books? No. But if you like her then this is a solid addition to her oeuvre; and it's also, currently, the oldest of her books I've read so it's interesting to see her style develop and start to settle in so early on in her career.
December 1, 2011
This was brilliant. Tyler's voices are always so beautifully realized. Every character has such a unique point of view and narration. I especially loved the voice of the woman who opened the novel; I could read a whole book about her.
Yes, it was an excellent book, but...
But it left me gazing at one of the unopened bottles of wine when I finished it.
And I finished it before noon.
Draw your own conclusions.
Yes, it was an excellent book, but...
But it left me gazing at one of the unopened bottles of wine when I finished it.
And I finished it before noon.
Draw your own conclusions.
August 12, 2016
Almost unbearably sad, a story about two people who need each other and love each other but can't find their way. They misinterpret and misread the cues, both afraid or incapable of speaking their true feelings. A man's desire to be needed, a woman's determination to not be dependent, to not burden him with her need. We can all learn from this wise and truthful tale about our most primitive selves and the misguided way we screw up our lives. I felt myself wanting to hold on to my nearest and dearest and say "I need you" - something that seems alien to me as an independent woman. Why would any man want that? Yet they do.
July 19, 2022
Typical Tyler. Interesting story about unusual, not necessarily likable, characters.
May 1, 2010
Tyler's most recognizable feature is her unique characters. To say many of her characters are off center is being polite. Many are just plain strange, but almost always in an appealing way. Tyler loves people, especially those who choose to approach life with their own unique view despite what society tells them. She is not naive about people, and the eternally unhappy person usually makes an appearance, but it is the strange and wonderful which capture her attention.
Celestial Navigation is Tyler's 5th novel, published in 1974 -- long before praise started coming her way. It focuses on Jeremy, a 38-year-old bachelor who has lived with his mother while rarely leaving their house. At the outset we find the mother has died and Jeremy's sisters enter the picture. The mother had turned their house into a boarding house, so Jeremy has company, but over the years he strays less and less from home until he is nearly confined inside. He is an artist with a studio on the top floor, and although at times he is a teacher to some budding artist, his detached and strange ways usually finds them leaving.
In the midst of all the changes comes Mary. She has left her husband and moved to Baltimore with her daughter to be with her new lover, but that eventually ends. Jeremy, much to his surprise, falls in love. Despite his strange ways and unattractive appearance (and Tyler excels in this description), she falls for him as well. In one of my favorite lines, after she tells him no to his marriage proposal, he shocks with the casual line: "What hope do you have for a better life, if you keep on saying no to everything new?"
They have a brood of children and Jeremy begins to make small excursions out and becomes successful as an artist. But now that he has Mary and all he wants, he finds himself drifting once again. The title refers to how Jeremy gets through life, by following his path in the heavens. He steers by a force unseen by others and unknown to him, but it is a path nonetheless.
Tyler writes the book from the perspectives of many characters. Only when doing it from Jeremy's perspective do we get more of a 3rd person narrative. This inconsistency would get Tyler bad marks in a creative writing program, but it works because Jeremy lacks the self consciousness of other people. Tyler takes us through 13 years of his life and we see people sail in and out of his life, but he continues on as before. Characters like Jeremy serve well to make us reexamine our own choices, but Tyler does not use them as foils for our own self interest. Her unique people are to be accepted and even treasured for who they are individually.
Where Tyler is sometimes criticized is for romanticizing characters and lives (okay, she is also criticized for not having much in the way of sex in her books, but I always thought that was a stupid thing to say about anyone). But Tyler is not romantic about her characters, as this novel will show you, although she is hopeful for them. If that constitutes a weak writer, I hope she continues losing strength!
Celestial Navigation is Tyler's 5th novel, published in 1974 -- long before praise started coming her way. It focuses on Jeremy, a 38-year-old bachelor who has lived with his mother while rarely leaving their house. At the outset we find the mother has died and Jeremy's sisters enter the picture. The mother had turned their house into a boarding house, so Jeremy has company, but over the years he strays less and less from home until he is nearly confined inside. He is an artist with a studio on the top floor, and although at times he is a teacher to some budding artist, his detached and strange ways usually finds them leaving.
In the midst of all the changes comes Mary. She has left her husband and moved to Baltimore with her daughter to be with her new lover, but that eventually ends. Jeremy, much to his surprise, falls in love. Despite his strange ways and unattractive appearance (and Tyler excels in this description), she falls for him as well. In one of my favorite lines, after she tells him no to his marriage proposal, he shocks with the casual line: "What hope do you have for a better life, if you keep on saying no to everything new?"
They have a brood of children and Jeremy begins to make small excursions out and becomes successful as an artist. But now that he has Mary and all he wants, he finds himself drifting once again. The title refers to how Jeremy gets through life, by following his path in the heavens. He steers by a force unseen by others and unknown to him, but it is a path nonetheless.
Tyler writes the book from the perspectives of many characters. Only when doing it from Jeremy's perspective do we get more of a 3rd person narrative. This inconsistency would get Tyler bad marks in a creative writing program, but it works because Jeremy lacks the self consciousness of other people. Tyler takes us through 13 years of his life and we see people sail in and out of his life, but he continues on as before. Characters like Jeremy serve well to make us reexamine our own choices, but Tyler does not use them as foils for our own self interest. Her unique people are to be accepted and even treasured for who they are individually.
Where Tyler is sometimes criticized is for romanticizing characters and lives (okay, she is also criticized for not having much in the way of sex in her books, but I always thought that was a stupid thing to say about anyone). But Tyler is not romantic about her characters, as this novel will show you, although she is hopeful for them. If that constitutes a weak writer, I hope she continues losing strength!
April 8, 2019
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 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.
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 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.
May 31, 2018
Anne Tyler has had a weird career. She's been a prolific author for decades, but the first one of her novel's that's really considered one of her classics is 1982's "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant", which was her 9th novel. Looking through her list of novels sorted by ŷ ratings, the most read of her books published before that one was "Searching for Caleb", her 6th novel, which ranks as her 14th most read book. That makes it so that every single novel starting with her 9th has more ratings on ŷ than every single one of her first 8 novels.
Which is to say that this book, which was published in 1974 and was her 5th novel, is not usually considered one of Anne Tyler's classics. And for good reason. There are elements of this that were OK but its hard not to see this as a way worse version of "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" and "The Accidental Tourist". One of the skills she really picked up over the years was how to imbue her unlikeable characters with a certain amount of charm. That's not really on display here.
Which is to say that this book, which was published in 1974 and was her 5th novel, is not usually considered one of Anne Tyler's classics. And for good reason. There are elements of this that were OK but its hard not to see this as a way worse version of "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" and "The Accidental Tourist". One of the skills she really picked up over the years was how to imbue her unlikeable characters with a certain amount of charm. That's not really on display here.
October 7, 2017
Three stars because Tyler is masterful at creating interesting, fully formed characters, but I can't say that I exactly "liked it." I've rarely been so frustrated by characters's actions (or lack of actions in this case.) I've rarely been so relieved to finish a book.
October 11, 2020
I found Anne Tyler through her book Saint Maybe, one of the most memorable books I have read, and it left me crying and angry at the end. Why do authors allow their characters to suffer, when they could write happy endings? Anyway, I picked up and read several of her books forthwith, this being one of them. She is also the author of The Accidental Tourist.
Her novels seem to settle on the same family with different names, and always the one who stands out as different; the one who never quite fits in. Many of us can relate, and I guess that is why her books are popular. Most take place in Baltimore.
I read this quite some time ago, those are the impressions that lasted.
Her novels seem to settle on the same family with different names, and always the one who stands out as different; the one who never quite fits in. Many of us can relate, and I guess that is why her books are popular. Most take place in Baltimore.
I read this quite some time ago, those are the impressions that lasted.
September 27, 2018
After reading the first section of Anne Tyler’s 1974 novel, I believe her fifth, I was swept away by her writing and remembered why she is one of my favorite novelists. The character of Amanda, this strident, spinster is wonderful and I’d have been happy to read a novel where she alone was the main character. This book, however, is primarily about Jeremy, her younger brother, an individual, probably on the autism spectrum, who has lived alone with their mother from birth, has agrophobia and a distinct lack of social skills as well as a talent for unusual painting.
Their mother dies at the beginning of the book and it seems as though Jeremy will continue to live his life in their Baltimore home with a collection of lodgers, many of whom have lived there for years, yet into his life comes Mary and everything changes. The book is narrated in part by Miss Vinton one of the lodgers, another character I would have liked to spend more time with, and Mary but primarily we are viewing the world from Jeremy’s perspective and I think whether this book succeeds or not depends on whether you find the character of Jeremy compelling.
The title refers to the fact that Jeremy navigates his way through life in a way that is so different to others and so unique. It becomes trickier to empathize with him as the novel progresses and I think the final quarter of the book is less successful with an ending that seems abrupt and unsatisfying yet Anne Tyler has this way of writing about relatively ordinary people, to make them seem more than that, which draws me in every time. There are better novels by her, less melancholy novels, but still this was a read I enjoyed and reveled in the Anne ‘Tylerness� of it all.
Some favorite lines
‘I don’t know which takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.�
‘He had become aware lately that other people seemed to possess an inner core of hardness that they took for granted. They hardly seemed to notice it was there; they had come by it naturally. Jeremy had been born without it.�
‘He pictures himself descending into the noise as he would enter the sea-proceeding steadily with his hands lifted and his mouth set, submerging first his feet and then his legs and then his entire body, last of all his head.�
‘How about Rapunzel, are we sure she was really happy ever after? Maybe the princess stopped loving her now that her hair was short. Maybe the Genuine Princess was a great disappointment to her husband being so quick to find faults and so forthright about pointing them out. And after Rumpelstiltskin was defeated the miller’s daughter lived in sorrow forever, for the king kept nagging her to spin more gold and she could never, never manage it again.�
‘It wasn’t for nothing I asked him that. Sometimes it seemed to me that Jeremy got up looking like other men and then faded away as he worked, as if art erased him somehow. As if each piece were another layer scraped off him, when already he was down to the quick.�
Their mother dies at the beginning of the book and it seems as though Jeremy will continue to live his life in their Baltimore home with a collection of lodgers, many of whom have lived there for years, yet into his life comes Mary and everything changes. The book is narrated in part by Miss Vinton one of the lodgers, another character I would have liked to spend more time with, and Mary but primarily we are viewing the world from Jeremy’s perspective and I think whether this book succeeds or not depends on whether you find the character of Jeremy compelling.
The title refers to the fact that Jeremy navigates his way through life in a way that is so different to others and so unique. It becomes trickier to empathize with him as the novel progresses and I think the final quarter of the book is less successful with an ending that seems abrupt and unsatisfying yet Anne Tyler has this way of writing about relatively ordinary people, to make them seem more than that, which draws me in every time. There are better novels by her, less melancholy novels, but still this was a read I enjoyed and reveled in the Anne ‘Tylerness� of it all.
Some favorite lines
‘I don’t know which takes more courage: surviving a lifelong endurance test because you once made a promise or breaking free, disrupting all your world.�
‘He had become aware lately that other people seemed to possess an inner core of hardness that they took for granted. They hardly seemed to notice it was there; they had come by it naturally. Jeremy had been born without it.�
‘He pictures himself descending into the noise as he would enter the sea-proceeding steadily with his hands lifted and his mouth set, submerging first his feet and then his legs and then his entire body, last of all his head.�
‘How about Rapunzel, are we sure she was really happy ever after? Maybe the princess stopped loving her now that her hair was short. Maybe the Genuine Princess was a great disappointment to her husband being so quick to find faults and so forthright about pointing them out. And after Rumpelstiltskin was defeated the miller’s daughter lived in sorrow forever, for the king kept nagging her to spin more gold and she could never, never manage it again.�
‘It wasn’t for nothing I asked him that. Sometimes it seemed to me that Jeremy got up looking like other men and then faded away as he worked, as if art erased him somehow. As if each piece were another layer scraped off him, when already he was down to the quick.�
February 26, 2025
Family, you can't live with them and you can't live without them. For most this might be a lame joke but for Anne Tyler it's a muse and obsession. The desire for creativity, induvial expression, and self reliance in a almost transcendentalist vein runs through all of her novels and most of her main characters. But it is counterbalanced by the need to belong, have roots and be connected in the quotidian of daily life and responsibilities. There is no permanent resolution, for it's a real pull in each direction that ebbs and flows throughout her character's lives. Thus the balance always needs readjusting, and occasionally wild recalibrations are necessary. In this tight and crystallized book we see the two polls played out fully between Mary Tell and Jeremy Pauling with their children as passengers.
This novel's epistemological concerns are as deep as many Faulkner's novels but much less showy. Jeremy Pauling is the subject we wish to know, our means of knowing him are others people's views of him dispersed through multiple pov chapters and a handful of Jeremy's pov chapters where he speaks/looks at himself in the third person; a little detached and distant even from himself. There in no full knowledge of oneself or another in Anne Tyler, only various degrees of intimacy and transparency; there are always unknown waters just around any corner no matter how at home we feel, people and the world have no end of uncharted mysteries.
Celestial Navigation: to finds one's location by looking at the position of the stars. A brilliant three-fold metaphor in this novel. Navigating the intersubjective seas between people, seeking artistic vision to guide our creative desires, and trying to navigate the social world through cues from other people. Each is a treacherous and unsure endeavor, promising much and asking us to risk much in return.
Jeremy is agoraphobic, socially limited and artistically obsessed. He hopes his relations with Mary and his children can help him into the broader social world of responsibilities and connection; with them and for them. Artistically like the old Greeks he is looking inward towards his "celestial" guidance to create art out of shapes and chaos. Part of being dedicated to art is a need for solitude, a locking oneself up in a room of ones own; at least for periods of time regularly. There's a natural tension between this need and participating in the daily life of a family with kids and a wife. Jeremys already limited social adeptness makes this even more difficult. I like that Mary has her own journey towards self-reliance and individuation as she grows older with an expanding family.
I'm rooting for these two lovable, flawed, and frustrating people throughout the novel. Anne Tyler at her best writes character driven stories, where the reader feels unsure where the story will end up because ultimately her characters retain aspects of mystery and unpredictability as real people do. I love this book and the journey it took me on. My favorite Anne Tyler novel and highly recommended.
Anne Tyler, Ranked (2/19/25)
1- Celestial Navigation
2- Saint Maybe
3- The Accidental Tourist
4- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
5- The Amateur Marriage
6- Searching for Caleb
7- Ladder of Years
8- The Clock Winder
9- A Slipping-Down Life
10- A Patchwork Planet
11- Back When We Were Grownups
12- Morgan's Passing
13- Breathing Lessons
14- A Spool of Blue Thread
15- Noah's Compass
16- Earthly Possessions
17- If Morning Ever Comes
18- Vinegar Girl
(I haven't read her more recent works. Unsure when I will, but I've enjoyed all her books so far except Vinegar girl)
This novel's epistemological concerns are as deep as many Faulkner's novels but much less showy. Jeremy Pauling is the subject we wish to know, our means of knowing him are others people's views of him dispersed through multiple pov chapters and a handful of Jeremy's pov chapters where he speaks/looks at himself in the third person; a little detached and distant even from himself. There in no full knowledge of oneself or another in Anne Tyler, only various degrees of intimacy and transparency; there are always unknown waters just around any corner no matter how at home we feel, people and the world have no end of uncharted mysteries.
Celestial Navigation: to finds one's location by looking at the position of the stars. A brilliant three-fold metaphor in this novel. Navigating the intersubjective seas between people, seeking artistic vision to guide our creative desires, and trying to navigate the social world through cues from other people. Each is a treacherous and unsure endeavor, promising much and asking us to risk much in return.
Jeremy is agoraphobic, socially limited and artistically obsessed. He hopes his relations with Mary and his children can help him into the broader social world of responsibilities and connection; with them and for them. Artistically like the old Greeks he is looking inward towards his "celestial" guidance to create art out of shapes and chaos. Part of being dedicated to art is a need for solitude, a locking oneself up in a room of ones own; at least for periods of time regularly. There's a natural tension between this need and participating in the daily life of a family with kids and a wife. Jeremys already limited social adeptness makes this even more difficult. I like that Mary has her own journey towards self-reliance and individuation as she grows older with an expanding family.
I'm rooting for these two lovable, flawed, and frustrating people throughout the novel. Anne Tyler at her best writes character driven stories, where the reader feels unsure where the story will end up because ultimately her characters retain aspects of mystery and unpredictability as real people do. I love this book and the journey it took me on. My favorite Anne Tyler novel and highly recommended.
Anne Tyler, Ranked (2/19/25)
1- Celestial Navigation
2- Saint Maybe
3- The Accidental Tourist
4- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
5- The Amateur Marriage
6- Searching for Caleb
7- Ladder of Years
8- The Clock Winder
9- A Slipping-Down Life
10- A Patchwork Planet
11- Back When We Were Grownups
12- Morgan's Passing
13- Breathing Lessons
14- A Spool of Blue Thread
15- Noah's Compass
16- Earthly Possessions
17- If Morning Ever Comes
18- Vinegar Girl
(I haven't read her more recent works. Unsure when I will, but I've enjoyed all her books so far except Vinegar girl)
April 20, 2015
It was worth reading, we all should know what it is like to be live life as a dysfunctional person or a person with serious life challenges. I read it to try and understand and to be more compassionate. Reading it did not help me much in how to help those with these challenges. Perhaps the closest it came was near the end when Jeremy is waiting for a bus with four other people. It explains why, as an aging senior, so many people one passes, look through you, past you, or over you, it is fear of what is going to happen to them and the don't know how to deal with it. I was glad to know that he noticed what they were doing.
I was also glad it was not the first Anne Tyler book I read or I may not have read more. I still have one on my shelf to read and I look forward to it. Ms. Tyler has great insight into people and her characters run the gamut. AS far as Celestial Navigation, it seemed to leave me hanging at the end. I hope you will read it and see what you think. Maybe there is no ending when living a dysfunctional life. (Yes, I know we are all dysfunctional at times, you will see what I mean after you read it.)
I was also glad it was not the first Anne Tyler book I read or I may not have read more. I still have one on my shelf to read and I look forward to it. Ms. Tyler has great insight into people and her characters run the gamut. AS far as Celestial Navigation, it seemed to leave me hanging at the end. I hope you will read it and see what you think. Maybe there is no ending when living a dysfunctional life. (Yes, I know we are all dysfunctional at times, you will see what I mean after you read it.)
March 2, 2019
The first Anne Tyler book I've ever read that I didn't enjoy. I'm shocked.
August 18, 2020
Not one of Anne Tyler's best (The Accidental Tourist would come close) but a great character, Jeremy, severely introverted and on the spectrum. I thought the story of his connection to (and disconnection from) Mary engaging. Well written.
May 7, 2015
First Anne Tyler book I did not care for. I did not finish it. There is no real reason other that I really did not like the narrator's voice at all.
November 1, 2015
Not my favourite Anne Tyler. I couldn't sympathise with the main character, Jeremy. Found this well-written, with great characterization, as all her novels, but a depressing read.
October 9, 2020
Anne Tyler's characters are always weird and eccentric. Sometimes they come across as merely quirky and curmudgeonly, but a few times they are clearly mentally ill. This is the case for the main character in Celestial Navigation: Jeremy Pauling is 38 and doesn't leave the house he lives in with his mother. He is an artist who works in solitude and creates collages of little people snipped from wrapping paper. When his mother dies, he is lost and unsure how to cope all alone. When he takes in a new boarder, Mary Tell and her young daughter, he falls in love with her.
The story is told from different point of views � Jeremy and Mary but also a few others - which worked really well for me. I found some things a little hard to believe (mainly how quickly Mary said yes to Jeremy's marriage proposal) and I didn't necessarily like any of the characters, but I found this novel really absorbing and really well-executed. Some of Anne Tyler's novels are pure comfort reads � this one definitely isn't and I liked it all the better for it. Some parts were very sad and really moving.
The story is told from different point of views � Jeremy and Mary but also a few others - which worked really well for me. I found some things a little hard to believe (mainly how quickly Mary said yes to Jeremy's marriage proposal) and I didn't necessarily like any of the characters, but I found this novel really absorbing and really well-executed. Some of Anne Tyler's novels are pure comfort reads � this one definitely isn't and I liked it all the better for it. Some parts were very sad and really moving.
July 8, 2020
If you have read books of Anne Tyler and you are curious to know the kind of author she is (given she never appears for any interviews or public events), this book will give you a glimpse of the kind of person she is. The book is semi-autobiographical in the sense that it gives the readers a peek at Anne Tyler’s process of creation, of writing a novel, the ways she observes mundaneness around her and picks them up to weave them into a story, beautifully. The book centres around the life of Jeremy, an artist who almost never steps out of his house and makes pieces of art whilst being home and observing incidents unfolding around him within that very space. Anne Tyler has certainly made a landmark contribution by writing about an agoraphobic man back in 1974. Her victory remains in the manner she has detailed his life and shown the vulnerabilities and the everyday troubles in living with the illness. This book is, by far, one of the most well written works of Tyler with respect to the style and language of the novel. Additionally, she has played with POVs in the book detailing the incidents from the other characters� eyes besides offering her own voice to Jeremy. The narrative style was successful in putting me in a quandary right in between the novel when I felt like I had to make a choice who I had to side with. Both the sides were so brilliantly and skilfully delineated that I realised how similarly difficult it is to make choices in life because consequences of most of our decisions are more often than not replete with the hollow feeling of not picking the other. My heart went out both to Jeremy and to Mary. Their decisions and indecisions will always remain as memories in my heart. Like Jeremy, Tyler has constructed a collage collecting bits and pieces from the different corners of the house and presented to us what it really feels like to have a family, to get married, to have children, to keep making a family work, to keep putting an effort to sustain a marriage together, everyday and to choose selflessly, and sometimes selfishly.
August 5, 2020
Imagine a magnifying glass…a really, really big one. It seems to me that author Anne Tyler uses just such a magnifying glass when she writes her incredible novels, moving closer and closer and closer to her characters so that we see them in a way we never would otherwise. Her books—and this is her fifth novel, which was published in 1974—have a minimal plot but characters so big, bold, and full that they seemingly run off the pages to inhabit the world.
This is the story of Jeremy Pauling, an artist who isolates himself from the world, rarely leaving his home and third-floor studio. (Today, he would probably be diagnosed with agoraphobia and likely some physician would pronounce him to be "on the spectrum.") He lives with this mother in a ramshackle Baltimore row house filled with an eccentric assortment of boarders. When his mother dies, he's left to manage the place. One day, Mary Tell and her little daughter, Darcy, come looking for a room, and the strangest thing happens to Jeremy: He falls in love. But Mary is harboring a big secret.
Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of the characters, including two of the boarders, which just makes the novel that much more emotionally resonant. Beautifully written with compassion, sensitivity, and insight into the human condition, this is an exquisite book that will creep into your heart and soul.
This is the story of Jeremy Pauling, an artist who isolates himself from the world, rarely leaving his home and third-floor studio. (Today, he would probably be diagnosed with agoraphobia and likely some physician would pronounce him to be "on the spectrum.") He lives with this mother in a ramshackle Baltimore row house filled with an eccentric assortment of boarders. When his mother dies, he's left to manage the place. One day, Mary Tell and her little daughter, Darcy, come looking for a room, and the strangest thing happens to Jeremy: He falls in love. But Mary is harboring a big secret.
Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of the characters, including two of the boarders, which just makes the novel that much more emotionally resonant. Beautifully written with compassion, sensitivity, and insight into the human condition, this is an exquisite book that will creep into your heart and soul.
February 18, 2016
Bellissimo!!
L'amore - paziente o meno - in questo libro non esiste (non a caso il titolo originale è "Celestial navigation").
L'autrice ci catapulta in una storia strana, a volte priva di logica, con personaggi al limite, dei quali è perfino difficile ricavarne l'aspetto fisico se non per cenni lasciati cadere qua e là. Sono delineati perfettamente però le loro personalità, le loro fragilità al punto che si riesce ad immedesimarsi in ognuno di loro. Tanti personaggi (anche quelli secondari) incapaci di relazioni affettive ma saldamente ancorati a legami necessari per la propria esistenza. Con una straordinaria forza descrittiva, Ann Tyler ci presenta esistenze racchiuse ciascuna in una boccia per pesci: realtà distorte, sensazioni alterate, isolamento costante. Tutti i personaggi sono imprigionati in gabbie di solitudine, intenti ad osservare la vita che scorre vicino ma senza mai riuscire ad avvicinarsi ad essa.
Il romanzo è inquietante, ma cattura e coinvolge fino all'ultima pagina
L'amore - paziente o meno - in questo libro non esiste (non a caso il titolo originale è "Celestial navigation").
L'autrice ci catapulta in una storia strana, a volte priva di logica, con personaggi al limite, dei quali è perfino difficile ricavarne l'aspetto fisico se non per cenni lasciati cadere qua e là. Sono delineati perfettamente però le loro personalità, le loro fragilità al punto che si riesce ad immedesimarsi in ognuno di loro. Tanti personaggi (anche quelli secondari) incapaci di relazioni affettive ma saldamente ancorati a legami necessari per la propria esistenza. Con una straordinaria forza descrittiva, Ann Tyler ci presenta esistenze racchiuse ciascuna in una boccia per pesci: realtà distorte, sensazioni alterate, isolamento costante. Tutti i personaggi sono imprigionati in gabbie di solitudine, intenti ad osservare la vita che scorre vicino ma senza mai riuscire ad avvicinarsi ad essa.
Il romanzo è inquietante, ma cattura e coinvolge fino all'ultima pagina
November 20, 2011
I read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, thoroughly enjoyed the story, characters, and themes. Celestial Navigation was a major disappointment and really didn't seem to go anywhere. I found the characters to be bland and not seeming to have being or any type of personality. I would skip this Anne Tyler book.
October 13, 2022
Some of the things that happen are a bit of a stretch, but that is one of Tyler's main points. People can do heroic, unpredictable things if they follow their stars -- autistic Jeremy comes to conquer his agoraphobia, and even court a woman. At the end of the book he does equally surprising things. But the cracks in a relationship can still always open up and destroy things.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 29, 2015
OMG Anne Tyler - enough with boring people with pathetic lives in Baltimore boarding houses.
March 22, 2019
I don't even know what to think or say. I love love love Anne Tyler; some of her books are my absolute favorites but this one? Not so much. It was "interesting".
June 15, 2024
I love Anne Tyler and read everything she writes. This is the first book that I didn’t like. In fact, I didn’t even finish it. It was slow-moving and the characters were dull.
August 18, 2020
Very similar to Morgan’s Passing, which I’d just finished reading before this. This book was written 6 years earlier, but it projects the same feelings. Jeremy was a total oddball, although not as quirky as Morgan. Was he a genius or mentally deficient? It was very hard to tell.
I enjoyed both books, just wish I hadn’t read them back to back. Discovered I have one more I missed, The Clock Winder. That will finish off my Tyler marathon.
I enjoyed both books, just wish I hadn’t read them back to back. Discovered I have one more I missed, The Clock Winder. That will finish off my Tyler marathon.
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