Navigating Early

Written by Clare Vanderpool, Navigating Early is a touching novel whose narrative is built by parallels and allegories. Its frequent mixing of fantasy and reality, however, doesn’t quite land, relying heavily on bizarre coincidences to work.

The story takes place in 1945, following a trip two boys undertake through a forest in Maine. Jackie, the protagonist, is a 13-year-old boy who has just lost his mother and is put in a military school by his father. There, he meets a weird boy named Early Auden, and a friendship starts. During Christmas, Early invites Jackie to go on an adventure with him, and Jackie, feeling alone, accepts.

Although Jackie is the protagonist, Early is the most interesting character in the novel. He’s a boy who knows by heart more than one hundred digits of the number Pi, but has a hard time making pragmatic inferences – he’s probably somewhere in the autism spectrum. Early is highly methodical, listening to only certain musicians each day of the week (Louis Armstrong on Mondays and Sinatra on Wednesdays, for example), and obsessive, thinking all the time about his mind-boggling plan to find out the true whereabouts of his brother, who – he was told – was killed during World War II.

The big theme of Navigating Early is the difficulty in accepting the departure of a loved one. Jackie lost his mother, which made him angry at the world and hate his father. Early, on the other hand, downright refuses to accept his brother’s death and creates a whole narrative to help him process the event.

This narrative moves between the tangible and the fantastic with great speed. There’s a moment when Early researches the weather data from the day of his brother’s death and, after comparing them to personal opinions – he believes his brother was a great swimmer –, tries to defend that his brother’s death was improbable. This makes sense, but Early also begins to see in the digits of Pi whole stories and characters that, when analyzed by him, also reveal the true whereabouts of his brother, which fully transports his quest to the realm of fantasy. This means that he wants to repeat Pi’s journey around the world and invites Jackie to go alongside him in a rowboat.

Early is depicted as a boy of impossible dreams: in his first scene, Jackie sees him on a beach building a sand wall to contain the whole ocean. The narrative is structured to gradually reveal his conflicts and personality, which is already pointed out by the ambiguity of the book’s title, Navigating Early.

The protagonist agrees to keep his friend company because he’s feeling alone and empathizes with Early’s pain. Jackie also feels lost, trying to find a direction in life, without success. Early, then, serves as his guide, which is reflected in his position on their boat: the protagonist rows in the direction Early points at.

Their journey through the forest is full of adventures, with encounters with pirates, bears, and mysterious characters. At the same time, Early keeps telling Jackie the story of Pi, which, being essentially allegorical, has an intrinsic relationship to what’s happening around them.

The problem with this idea is that, in many cases, Early, living up to his name in a way, tells the story of Pi before the events that reflect it happen. In other words, his allegorical story often precedes reality, which means he’s basically predicting the future.

The narrative makes a point of establishing an aura of mysticism around the character, putting him, for example, saying the same lines as Jackie’s mother and suddenly disappearing as soon as the protagonist notices the coincidence. However, this supernatural aura is eventually abandoned, since Early is, in the end, just a boy. This is hardly a spoiler, because it is obvious from the start that he has no supernatural abilities – but this makes such moments of mystery feel artificial as soon as they appear, never obscuring the fact that they are just a means for Vanderpool to build some level of tension.

This disconnection between fantasy and reality occurs throughout the entire book, which is ironic when we consider that Pi’s magical story keeps blending itself with Early and Jackie’s journey. In the end, there is a paradox in the narrative of Navigating Early: if, on the one hand, it is entirely structured around the confusion between what’s real and what’s just Early’s imagination, on the other, the implausibility of the links between the two narrative layers reinforces the division between them. Early keeps tying fantasy and reality together and the story keeps separating them by failing to justify the connection.

When the coincidences start to become frequent, any reader who notices this contradiction will start to question their nature rather than accept them. There is a scene in Pi’s story, for example, in which the character encounters a lady who confuses him with her lost son. Shortly after telling this, Early comes across a lady who confuses Jackie with her lost son. The coincidence, then, assumes a false, artificial tone. In the novel, the imaginary often spills over into the real, although it is not fully accepted by it: Early is not magical, their world is not magical, and all events are explained rationally. Nonetheless, the boy predicts the future in rich detail. Even the flavor of the lady’s son’s favorite jelly matches Jackie’s. Navigating Early, then, is trying to have the cake and it too: the story is grounded in reality, but its structure only makes sense in the realm of fantasy.

Vanderpool, at least, uses these coincidences to create some interesting parallels: the forest lady, for example, lost her son and Jackie his mother, so they complete each other. However, the structure of the book becomes repetitive due to the frequency with which this device is used: Pi’s journey coincides in detail with Jackie’s and, as Pi represents Early’s brother, Jackie ends up assuming the same function. This means that in each chapter there will be always some coincidence that connects them, turning the whole thing a bit predictable. And sadly, the narrative doesn’t seem to care about how inexplicable that coincidence might be; the important thing is just to make the connection.

The book’s climax, true to form, represents the pinnacle of this problem. It’s an amalgam of revelations that confirm Early as the ultimate prophet, whose predictions, even when arbitrary and illogical, always come true.

One element that is used well in the novel is Early’s ability to see colors and textures in numbers. At one point, for example, he only sees zeros in Pi’s story and, since it was already established that zeros look like blood to him, a charge of tension is injected into the narrative.

Navigating Early tells a story about love and loss, about finding your true north in the figure of a friend. It’s a shame, then, that it shows such disregard for its internal consistency, delivering a story that, although poignant, often reminds the reader of its own artificiality.

December 21, 2024.

Review originally published in Portuguese on April 01, 2017.