Celestial Navigation.

Seasons Greetings from the Mega-Bookstore!
If it was one degree more hot today I would have melted like that witch on the Yellow Brick Road to Oz!
A big slimy bookpuddle!

Just minutes ago I finished reading a really good novel called Celestial Navigation.
Nope.
It was NOT about charting your astrological future.
It was NOT about building the perfect spaceship.
It was NOT about finding bigger and better coffeeshops by following signs in the heavens....
It was about artistic obsession. And other things, yes.
But mostly the artistic obsession of this reclusive artist, Jeremy Pauling.
Jeremy is the proprietor of a boarding house where all types of somewhat eccentric people can be found occupying the rooms. But no one comes close to being as eccentric as Jeremy himself. He can be holed-up in his third-floor studio for days at a time, working on his secret creations. His artwork sort of defies genre. It is part sculpture, part bas-relief sort of glue-together-parts-of-things-found-in-the-room thingamajigs.... but he has a remarkable talent for creating feeling in his work. His work, crazy as it is, seems to breathe, and evoke movement. It attracts buyers, mostly through the promotional efforts of his college friend, an art dealer named Brian.
The infrequent selling of his work, the winning of occasional contests, and the meagre rents he collects from his tenants, keep the house running.
The epitome of artistic reclusiveness, Jeremy has not been any further than the local corner store for years!
But soon, the young single mother Mary Tell moves in, with her daughter Darcy. And this changes Jeremy’s life. And it changes Mary's life. The novel is shaped around the effect that each of these people have on the other. As Jeremy will learn in retrospect, Mary has given his life an “eyelike” shape, rather than the never-ending flatline that it would have most surely been, had he never known her.
It is a brilliant book by an author that I know very little about.
Anne Tyler.
Celestial Navigation was published in 1974, and as such, it is by no means one of your modern novels. No one here is playing with the internet or looking for better deals at Best Buy! Often it seems quite dated.
Me, I like this. I am uncommon in this respect. I sort of like older books.
And it is definitely not an ACTION sort of book. Plus, there are no pictures, if you are into that. It is a book deep in its characterization. The examination of the inner workings of some fairly convoluted people.
As I said, I know very little about Anne Tyler, but picking up a few of her other books here in the store, I seem to get a sense of what it is she does best. And it is what she was doing best here, in Celestial Navigation. Showing us the inner workings... the cogs, the gears of what makes her characters tick and think and act. Or NOT tick, or NOT think, or NOT act.
And that second grouping of possibilities is much more difficult (I think) to write about well!
She does it. At times we are watching the paint dry on the walls, but she rewards an attentive reader who is willing to watch for a paragraph or two. The story is great. A lesser author would lose me in the depiction of some of the mundanity here. She kept me profoundly interested.
On the back of one of her books, the St.Louis Post-Dispatch says “Anne Tyler is a wise and perceptive writer with a warm understanding of human foibles.”
BINGO!
That’s it.
I want to read more of her stuff. She is still writing books, and her most recent work, The Amateur Marriage came out in 2004. It is her sixteenth novel. Her eleventh, entitled Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
If you have read her books, send me some comments on how you have enjoyed, or not enjoyed them, and why.
Do you have a favorite?
If she writes elsewhere, as well as she does here in Celestial Navigation, I want to go there.