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.
The protagonist of Celestial Navigation is Jeremy Pauling, a reclusive and misunderstood artist who rarely ventures outside of his studio. With a less talented writer, Jeremy's character might have remained a cliché, a starving artist who sacrifices friends and family for the higher calling of his art. But Tyler brings a level of nuance and understanding to this flawed individual and presents him as a multi-dimensional human being.Admittedly, Jeremy is not a likeable character (he's selfish, indulgent, cowardly, uncharitable), but in this novel he becomes fully realized. That's what makes Tyler such a compelling writer: she makes even dull and ordinary characters half interesting, if not intriguing. Readers may be not impressed with Jeremy and the life he's chosen, but you must admire Tyler's ability to bring all aspects of his character to life.After reading Celestial Navigation, my opinion of Jeremy didn't change much, but I did walk away with a deeper appreciation for what makes him tick. To be sure, he marches to the beat of a different drummer and seems entirely okay with that. In this novel, Tyler pretty much nails him, for better or worse.
What do You think about Celestial Navigation (1996)?
Jeremy ha 38 anni quando muore sua mamma. Ha sempre vissuto con lei, non si è mai allontanato dall'isolato in cui abita e la sua fonte di reddito sono le persone che da anni affittano le stanze della sua squallida casa. Ad una tratto arriva la giovane Mary con la figlioletta, e lui goffamente se ne innamora, gli sembra la donna più bella che abbia mai visto, inizia a corteggiarla in un modo così impacciato che lei non se ne accorge nemmeno. Lui sa di non essere un uomo attraente nè affascinante, ma vorrebbe tanto chiedere a Mary di sposarlo. L'unico modo che conosce è quello che ha sentito nei libri d'amore che gli leggeva sua mamma, cioè inginocchiarsi davanti a lei e proporglielo. Ma riesce a malapena a parlarle, e il pensiero di inginocchiarsi, avere gli occhi all'altezza della sua vita e vederle il viso solo da sotto lo terrorizza. Così non trova mai il momento di farlo.Un giorno, quasi per caso, si lascia convincere ad accompagnare Mary e la bambina a fare la spesa. È completamente perso e angosciato quando attraversa la strada ed esce dal suo isolato, tanto che si sente male e cade a terra. Mary, che si era allontanata per fare le compere, accorre, e lui, guardandola dalla sua posizione supina, vedendo l'orlo del suo vestito e il triangolo del suo mento, proprio in quel momento di confusione, in mezzo a sconosciuti, le chiede di sposarlo.Mi piace molto Anne Tyler, crea personaggi molto interessanti. E teneri, anche, come il povero Jeremy, che ha paura di aprire la porta e di rispondere al telefono, che sa concentrarsi solo sui particolari e mai sulle cose nel loro insieme, che lascia le frasi a metà perchè si perde nei suoi pensieri e poi si dimentica che stava parlando.
—Thais
Not my favorite Anne Tyler. In fact I would place it as low as it can go, on par with "Patchwork Planet" and "Ladder of Years." There really is no such thing as a bad Anne Tyler novel, but some merely hint at her potential. Such is the case with "Celestial Navigation." It has some of her hallmarks -- Baltimore location, quirky and methodical characters, characters who are stuck in their ways but have the potential to break out into something richer. Such is the case for Jeremy Pauling. Although it never says so explicitly, he seems autistic. He lives in his own world, but that changes when he falls in love. Will Jeremy stretch beyond his comfort zone so he can be with Mary and their expanding brood?"Celestial Navigation" lacks an engrossing protagonist, and it lacks the charming humor that is present in so many of my favorite Tyler novels. It's not bad by any means, I just was disappointed. In general, I think Tyler's early and most recent books are her weakest. The middle years are hard to beat. Try "Accidental Tourist" "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" "Morgan's Passing" "Earthly Possessions" and "Searching for Caleb."
—Alex
This story is set in the 1960s in a Baltimore rowhouse/boarding house, owned by Mrs. Pauling, the mother of an artistic 38-year-old man, Jeremy Pauling, who never left home. Jeremy is painfully shy, and has many symptoms of agoraphobia and of autism. The story begins with the death of Jeremy's mother and the funeral arrangements that needed to be handled by his two out-of-town sisters, Amanda and Laura. Amanda is unsympathetic to her brother's inability to come out of his shell, and attempts to persuade him to leave the boarding house and live with her and her sister in Richmond. Jeremy refuses and remains in the house. We meet many of the boarders who form a family of sorts and assist Jeremy in running the boarding house. But a new boarder, Mary Tell and her preschool daughter, Darcy, begin to inspire Jeremy in a new way. Mary has left her husband to live with a new lover, John, who has promised to divorce his wife and marry her. While John is supposedly arranging his divorce, he places Mary and Darcy in Jeremy's boarding house. When John returns to his wife, Mary and Darcy are left rather crushed and somewhat destitute, with no options but to remain in their boarding house room. Mary becomes anxious about her financial situation and the difficulty of raising Darcy under these conditions, but Jeremy and the other boarders help and support her in various ways. In the meantime, Jeremy has fallen in love with Mary, but is totally lost as to how to pursue his love.
—Dana
