Celestial Navigation

Author: Anne Tyler
Date Finished: 5/28/06

Anne Tyler’s books should come with a warning label that says, “Talk to the people you love or you’ll end up miserable.” Celestial Navigation is one of the more depressing of her novels that I’ve read, and I’ve read quite a few. In this book, told from multiple points of view, a shy artist, Jeremy Pauling, lives with his mother, staying mostly in his art studio on the top floor of their Baltimore row house. When his mother dies, he takes in a boarder, Mary Tell and her young daughter.

Jeremy and Mary fall into what looks like a marriage to all eyes; they cannot actually be married because Mary’s first husband will not give her a divorce (the book is set in the 60s). Jeremy goes from a quiet loner with a mildly successful art career to a completely bewildered father of six, struggling to find a way to interact with his family even as his art becomes successful enough to support his large brood.

In typical Tyler fashion, both Mary and Jeremy come to feel trapped by their circumstances, worried that the life in front of them isn’t the life they were meant to have at all. Tyler is at her best when she is describing the little conversations and miscommunications that tangle up human relationships. In other novels, Tyler resolves the tangles on a more hopeful note; in this one, while there is no tragedy, there is no happy ending.

Reading Tyler is always a lovely experience, sort of like listening to your own brain chatter that has been refined and distilled down to its essential content. Celestial Navigation is lovely, so lovely that you hope and hope for the characters to come to their senses and go forward being lovely together. Although they do not, Tyler's ability to give us a peek into her characters' reasons for acting the way they do is always worth the time spent reading her work.

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players
Date Finished: 4/20/06

I've been reading. I've been busy. I haven't been writing.

I read this book because the fantastic Mrs. M-MV mentioned it on her always inspiring blog. The author, Stefan Fatsis, took up Scrabble in a serious way, taking a leave of absence from his job at The Wall Street Journal to memorize words (not just any words, only those from The Official Tournament and Club Word List are acceptable in competitive play), study strategy, and travel to tournaments. There are Scrabble tournaments you ask? Yes. Yes, there are and Fatsis tells you about them, faithful reader. In detail.

Fatsis stretches his experience from meaty-article to book-manuscript length by including stories about the history of Scrabble, both its invention and the evolution of tournaments, as well as the personal stories of selected players. It is frightening to note that most of the players Fatsis profiles are not far from living in a Van! Down by the River! Quitting your job to play Scrabble full time seems awfully odd until you read about other players who don't exactly have jobs. Instead, they live with their mothers or bounce from venture to venture or collect disability and write letters to the Scrabble newsletter complaining about inclusion or exclusion of certain words in the game.

To his credit, Fatsis is clear-eyed about his obsession with increasing his Scrabble rating. He realizes that it is just a game, and yet, he can't shake the desire to become an elite player and compete with the big boys. He even admits that the story book ending would be for him to play in the highest class at the National Scrabble Championship and rally to beat one of the top players who he befriended during his journey. That doesn't happen. Instead, he plays in the second class at the Nationals and finishes 51st out of 105 players. He then goes on to end his story with these sentences from the epilogue, after resuming his job and social life and then playing badly in a tournament, causing his rating to slip: "It's a number I can't live with. The next morning, on the subway to work, I whip out a list of five-letter words, and the cycle begins anew."

I admit that I considered buying a Scrabble set after reading this book. I also admit that the story bogged down for me in the middle when Fatsis spent several chapters discussing the evolution of competative play. What interested me were the stories of the players and why they felt compelled to do Scrabble the way that they do. Fatsis's willingness to explore his own reasons for his obsession kept me going with this book, as I waited to see whether he would emerge from the tiles and word lists and pick up his "normal" life again. As the ending of the book reveals, he did and he didn't. And that, faithful reader, is something I like in a story.