Noah’s Compass – Anne Tyler
I went to a second hand book store/book exchange and I always feel I have to buy something. So when I saw this Anne Tyler novel I was on it. I have read quite a few Anne Tyler novels – I like how the ordinary is made extraordinary.
Here is the blurb …
Quintessential Tyler, yet full of surprises – a perfectly pitched, enchanting and affecting novel about a man adrift in his own life, Noah’s Compass chimes gently, heart-breakingly with our times.
With the humour and poignancy of her classic The Accidental Tourist (though with a protagonist who doesn’t venture far from home) Anne Tyler’s new novel tells the story of a year in the life of Liam Pennywell, a man in his sixty-first year. A classical pedant, he’s just been ‘let go’ from his school teaching job and downsizes to a tiny out-of-town apartment, where he goes to bed early and alone on his first night.
Widowed, re-married, divorced and the father of three daughters, Liam is a man who is proud of his recall but has learned to dodge issues and skirt adventure. An unpleasant event occurs, though, to jolt him out of his certainty. Obsessed with a frightening gap in his memory, he sets out to uncover what happened, and finds instead an unusual woman with secrets of her own, and a late-flowering love that brings its own thorny problems. His ex-wife (sensible Barbara) and daughters worry about him but Liam blunders on, His teenage daughter Kitty is sent to stay – though it’s not clear who is minding whom. His middle daughter, Louise, is a born-again Christian with a son called Jonah, but her certainties leave Liam still more perplexed.
Noah’s Compass is about memory and its loss, about incidents and relationships which open up sight lines into a painful past long dead for a man who becomes aware that merely trying to stay afloat may not be enough.
Liam is disconnected from his own life – he has few friends and seems disengaged from his children. His two older children are angry at his emotional absence, but he just seems confused by them. At the start, Liam has given up. He is planning on leading a small life – marking time until he dies – and then he suffers memory loss after a burglary gone wrong and becomes obsessed by the memory gap. While visiting a neuroscientist he overhears another patient in the waiting room being reminded (subtly) of someone’s name and he decides that’s what he needs a ‘rememberer’. He stalks this woman and they have a relationship – although she is not as she seems.
Liam is a non-stick man – he passes through life and nothing seems to stick – wives, children, friends, jobs. He is going through the motions but is not living. However, his memory loss, meeting Eunice, having Kitty (and her boyfriend) move in, minding Jonah and his oldest daughter’s anger seems to somehow ignite him and he becomes part of the world.
As always, the writing is beautiful, but unobtrusive.
More reviews …
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/aug/16/noahs-compass-anne-tyler
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/books/review/Harrison-t.html?_r=0