User:Linde4Duende/Celestial Navigation (novel)

Celestial Navigation (1974) is #REDIRECT Anne Tyler's fifth novel, also set in Baltimore.

from The Accidental Literary Star By MEL GUSSOW Published: Monday, February 16, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/books/the-accidental-literary-star.html

With luminous prose she has followed the undercurrents of marital discord and the bonds that hold families together -- and that tear them apart -- as she studies, in the critic Benjamin DeMott's phrase, the costs of parental truancy.

The real heroes to me in my books are first the ones who manage to endure, and second the ones who somehow are able to grant other people the privacy of the space around them and yet still produce some warmth.

from May 8, 1977

Anne Tyler, Writer 8:05 to 3:30 By MARGUERITE MICHAELS http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/19/specials/tyler-writer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Now working on her eighth novel, Tyler doesn't see herself building up to "the great book." "I think of my work as a whole. And really what it seems to me I'm doing is populating a town. Pretty soon it's going to be just full of lots of people I've made up. None of the people I write about are people I know. That would be no fun. And it would be very boring to write about me. Even if I led an exciting life, why live it again on paper? I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances. It's lucky I do it on paper. Probably I would be schizophrenic--and six times divorced--if I weren't writing. I would decide that I want to run off and join the circus and I would go. I hate to travel, but writing a novel is like taking a long trip. This way I can stay peacefully at home."

She finished her first novel, "If Morning Ever Comes," in 1964, but only after leaving the manuscript--almost on purpose--on a plane. She hates it and hates her second novel, "The Tin Can Tree." Her favorites is her fifth "Celestial Navigation," possibly because its central character, Jeremy, who never leaves Baltimore block and lives life from a distance, is the closest Anne Tyler has come to writing about herself.

"My interest is character. The real joy of writing is how people can surprise one. My people can surprise one. My people wander around my study until the novel is done. It's one reason I'm very careful not to write about people I don't like. If I find somebody creeping in that I'm not really fond of, I usually take him out. I end a book a the point where I feel that I'm going to know forever what their lives are like.

"I have no world view," says Tyler, "Reading Eudora Welty when I was growing up showed me that very small things are often really larger than the large things. I know that here are some central preoccupations that keep popping up over and over in my books. I'm very interested in day-to-day endurance. And I'm very interested in space around people. The real heroes to me in my books are first the ones who manage to endure and second the ones who somehow are able to grant other people the privacy of the space around them and yet still produce warmth.

"Populating the town is what's most important," says Tyler, "but it does matter to me that I be considered a serious writer. Not necessarily important, but serious. A serious book is one that removes me to another life as I am reading it. It has to have layers and layers and layers, like life does. It has to be an extremely believable lie."

http://www.nytimes.com/1974/04/28/books/tyler-celestial.html