Review by New York Times Review
NOAH, Liam Pennywell explains to his grandson, "didn't need a compass, or a rudder, or a sextant." He didn't need sails on his ark, either, because there was no place to go in a drowned world. "Noah's Compass" is Anne Tyler's 18th novel, and we've met Liam before. He's cut from the same cloth as Macon Leary, the immovable author of the travel guides for which "The Accidental Tourist" is titled; as Jeremy Pauling, the reclusive artist whose life is narrated by the cast of women in "Celestial Navigation"; as Barnaby Gaitlin, of "A Patchwork Planet," employed by "Rent-a-Back" to do other people's errands. Lonely and defeated, self-effacing to a fault, Tyler's male protagonists experience life as if it were an unexpected wave breaking over their heads, leaving them in sodden, lingering bewilderment. A device as primitive as a compass couldn't deliver them to a happy ending. Too confused, and too impotent, to align its points with reality, they need the psychogenic equivalent of a GPS device to tell them what road to take out of inertia. At 61, Liam has lost his job "teaching fifth grade in a second-rate private boys' school," an embarrassment he accepts with the informed stoicism of someone who completed all but his dissertation for a doctorate in philosophy. Now he can settle into retirement in a smaller, cheaper apartment on the outskirts of Baltimore, the city Tyler owns as a novelist, so faithfully does she return to its setting. But before Liam has spent even one night in what he expects will be his "final dwelling place," a would-be burglar comes through the back door Liam failed to lock. The next thing Liam knows, he's in a hospital bed, his head bandaged, with no idea of how he came to be there. The burglar may not have made off with any of Liam's material possessions, but he hit him hard enough to obliterate a few hours' worth of his memory, and it is this loss - rather than that of a teaching position he didn't much like - that serves as a catalyst for all that follows. Neither his ex-wife nor his three daughters, who consider Liam so obtuse they call him Mr. Magoo, understand his growing fixation on retrieving what he can't remember, especially as it was, presumably, traumatic. But as Liam understands it, "his true self had gone away from him and had a crucial experience without him and failed to come back afterward." To address what feels to him like a serious affliction, Liam fastens on Eunice, a frumpy young woman he encounters in the waiting room of a doctor he consults for his amnesia. Eunice works for Ishmael Cope, a billionaire land developer who, at 76, needs a "social facilitator" to remember names and appointments he forgets. Once Liam learns that such assistance can be acquired, he sets to work fulfilling the fantasy that he, too, can have an "external hard drive," as Eunice describes herself. In the one aspect of the plot that feels contrived, Liam searches the Internet for information about Cope, stalks the old man and his caretaker, and introduces himself as someone who met the developer at a benefit, a lie that can't be refuted by someone with a failing memory. Perhaps Tyler intends Liam's desire for what he calls "someone else to experience your life for you" to justify the lengths to which she forces this slow-moving, passive man in his attempt to finagle a transaction with a stranger glimpsed at a doctor's office. But the madcap nature of the quest feels out of character and doesn't succeed as comedy. And no wonder. Liam believes his life is "drying up and hardening, like one of those mouse carcasses you find beneath a radiator." He's "just trying to make it through to bedtime every night." "I am not especially unhappy," he imagines writing on a postcard to the public, "but I don't see any particular reason to go on living." As it turns out, Liam's disengagement is a symptom of depression. And while novels are populated by the luckless and lovelorn, depressed people are not very funny, even when they do funny things. Grief is what Liam would feel if he allowed himself the emotion. Grief and anger. His first wife, whom he'd "pursued singlemindedly," killed herself and left him with a toddler. Unable to respond to the magnitude of his loss, Liam abandoned his job as a university instructor and moved back to Baltimore to be near his mother and sister. He began teaching high school history and married a cheerful, self-reliant woman with whom he had two more daughters, and who divorced him when she could no longer stand his "glancing relationship with his own life." What this novel needs is a heroine. Tyler's heroes may not live up to the word, but the women she invents can be vivid, delightful and capable of surprising action. Remember Maggie Moran from "Breathing Lessons," compulsively matchmaking and meddling to rearrange life into a picture she likes? Or what about Delia Grinstead in "Ladder of Years," who acts out the guilty fantasy of countless housewives? Unable to endure another minute with her husband and children, and wearing little more than a bathing suit, she walks out of a family beach vacation and onto a bus, headed for a new, unencumbered existence. "Noah's Compass" is filled with women, but none of the obvious candidates - Eunice, Liam's former wife, his daughters, his sister - evolve into the kind of heroine Tyler does so well. The one riveting and genuinely funny character doesn't arrive until the novel's end, and yet it's almost worth waiting for her: Bootsie Twill, the mother of Lamont, the boy who assaulted Liam, the son she calls "goodhearted, kindhearted, . . . the product of a broken home," who "might be bipolar, or whatchamacallit, A.D.D." The absurd notions Bootsie hurls at Liam to persuade him to serve as a character witness (!) at her son's coming trial land with the galvanizing energy of a slap. "Oh, why are you so judgmental?" she exclaims when Liam expresses doubt about Lamont's good intentions. She'll bring her son over so Liam can experience "what a nice kid he is. Just a kid! Real shy and clumsy, always nicks himself shaving. That would tell you about his character." Bootsie's cameo is the epitome of too little too late, but it pushes Liam to a necessary discovery. The "crucial experience" he missed had nothing to do with his having suffered a concussion; it was after his first wife's suicide that his true self failed to return. Sixty-one years old, Liam goes back to preschool, as an assistant teacher. (Liam's students grow ever younger in tandem with his deepening appreciation of his withered psyche.) If Bootsie doesn't arrive in time to save "Noah's Compass," she does shock Liam out of his depression and premature retirement. And she shows us what we've been missing: a female voice that can't be ignored or dismissed. Anne Tyler's male protagonists experience life as if it were an unexpected wave breaking over their heads. Kathryn Harrison's most recent book, "While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family," has just been released in paperback.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 13, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Ever since the 1964 publication of her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, on up to her triumphant Digging to America (2006), Tyler has been writing fluent and droll tales about endearing eccentrics, the pull and push of family life, and the ups and downs of solitude, camouflaging keen inquiries into the mysteries of existence with nimble dialogue and antic plots. In Tyler's eighteenth novel, Liam Pennywell, a 61-year-old philosopher who has never worked in his field, loses his fifth-grade teaching position. He stoically gives up his roomy Baltimore apartment for a smaller, shoddier place; falls gratefully into bed on the first night in his new place; and wakes up in the hospital. He has stitches in his head and hand and can't remember a thing about what happened. This lost time profoundly disturbs him and precipitates a fascination with an odd duck named Eunice, who works as a rememberer. As Liam, a curmudgeonly romantic, frets about erased memories and pursues the increasingly enigmatic Eunice, his precious privacy is violated by his three bossy daughters and ex-wife in a farcical series of invasions. Liam's gradual realization that he has missed much more than one night has subtle but profound metaphysical implications. Only Tyler could write such a gently hilarious and wise comedy of obliviousness and discovery.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Like Tyler's previous protagonists, Liam Pennywell is a man of unexceptional talents, plain demeanor, modest means and curtailed ambition. At age 60, he's been fired from his teaching job at a "second-rate private boys' school" in Baltimore, a job below his academic training and original expectations. An unsentimental, noncontemplative survivor of two failed marriages and the emotionally detached father of three grown daughters, Liam is jolted into alarm after he's attacked in his apartment and loses all memory of the experience. His search to recover those lost hours leads him into an uneasy exploration of his disappointing life and into an unlikely new relationship with Eunice, a socially inept walking fashion disaster who is half his age. She is also spontaneous and enthusiastic, and Liam longs to cast off his inertia and embrace the "joyous recklessness" that he feels in her company. Tyler's gift is to make the reader empathize with this flawed but decent man, and to marvel at how this determinedly low-key, plainspoken novelist achieves miracles of insight and understanding. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"In the sixty-first year of his life, Liam Pennywell lost his job." Echoing loudly the cadences of biblical prose, Tyler's opening sentence portends Liam's ominous downward spiral. Soon after he's forced into early retirement from a second-rate private boy's school, Liam moves to a smaller apartment. Once unpacked, he lies down to sleep and wakes up the next morning, head sore and bandaged, in the hospital. With no recollection about how he ended up there, Liam wanders through his days searching, much like Noah scanning the desolate waters for land. Along the way, he meets Eunice, who cannot prod his memory of that night but does stir some of Liam's other long-forgotten feelings. Working at her characteristically leisurely pace, Tyler poignantly portrays one man's search for wholeness and redemption as he picks up the shards of a life shattered by the crashing waves of aging. Unlike similar Updike and Roth characters, who worry more about their inability to perform sexual athletics any longer, Tyler's character struggles with the visceral loss of identity brought on by forced retirement and the indignities of memory loss. Verdict Another winning effort by Tyler; for readers of Reynolds Price's The Promise of Rest and early Tyler novels such as Dinner at Homesick Restaurant. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/09.]-Henry Carrigan, Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Instead of the measured critical commentary typically found here, let's consider this column a mash note. For the converted, the publication of a new Anne Tyler novel is like holy communion, a ritual return to the altar of the Homesick Restaurant, another opportunity to explore the muddles of the human condition in language as clear as a mountain spring. Noah's Compass, her 18th novel, is one of Tyler's more deceptively rich and enigmatically titled (there is no character named Noah, and the evocation of the Bible story lasts less than a page). Set as usual in her native Baltimore, the novel concerns a fifth-grade, private-school teacher named Liam Pennywell, who has been "downsized" from his employment at the age of 60 and who subsequently suffers a traumatic injury that causes him to lose a bit of his memory. His life had seemed pretty empty before he left the job he disliked, and now it seems emptier. His first wife committed suicide (he still appears numb to this tragedy), and his second divorced him in exasperation. His three daughters don't know him as well as does his one sister, whom he sees maybe once per year. He has one friend but has no idea how that relationship has sustained itself. "I'm not unhappy, but I don't see any particular reason to go on living," admits Liam. Not the most promising protagonist, but Tyler remains the most extraordinary chronicler of everyday wonders, the author who best understands how our flaws define us, yet how difficult it is for us to absolve others until we are able to absolve ourselves. Life never goes as planned, but the surprises it offers to those who are receptive to them can provide redemption beyond expectation. Through some combination of initiative, fate and chance, Liam discovers in his search for his missing memory just how much he has repressed, and he finds himself opento love and to hurtat an age when he thought he'd left such emotions behind. "It's as if I've never been entirely present in my own life," he says. Such a discovery doesn't inevitably lead to a happily-ever-after conclusion. Beneath the comedy on the surface of any Tyler novel lies an undercurrent of existential melancholy. His feelings renewed, Liam sees himself "ambushed by complexitiesIt struck him that life in general was heartbreakinga word he didn't toss off lightly." In Tyler's novels (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, 1982; the Pulitzer Prizewinning Breathing Lessons, 1988), to understand is to forgive. We are formed by our past but need not be imprisoned by it. Some families thrown together through happenstance can forge stronger bonds than those related by blood. Small epiphanies can awaken us to possibilities we had never anticipated. By the end of the novel, the particulars of Liam's life really haven't changed that much, but he is utterly transformed. And so will be the reader. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
