Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigation

Cecilia Donohue (Independent Scholar - North America)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1974

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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In her fifth novel,

Celestial Navigation

(published in the United States in 1974), author Anne Tyler utilizes multiple points of view to chronicle the dysfunction and primary casualty of the Pauling family, residents of the Baltimore, Maryland, USA suburb of Roland Park that serves as the backdrop for many of her works. Interspersed among the first-person testimonies of sibling Amanda Pauling, lover Mary Tell, and two boarders (spinster bookseller Miss Vinton and teenage hippie Olivia), is the story of protagonist Jeremy Pauling, who, symbolically and appropriately, is never granted a first-person chapter of his own.

A middle-aged bachelor, Jeremy suffers from severe agoraphobia, the result of being the youngest child of an overprotective mother, according to Amanda, who rhetorically asks

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595 words

Citation: Donohue, Cecilia. "Celestial Navigation". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 June 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6149, accessed 20 April 2024.]

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