Noah's Compass

If you are lucky, sometime during your life, you will meet that one person you belong with -- to have and to hold from that day forward. If you are very lucky you get to be with that person for a long time. If you are extremely lucky, that person is the last you ever need to meet.

Anne Tyler is one

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of my favorite authors, and I haven’t read anything by her in quite a while. She revels in relationships made and broken, found and solidified, and sometimes found and lost in a couple of week’s time.

Liam Pennywell is nearly 61. He has a job he loves and does well, but it was not what he prepared himself to do. He drives a used Geo, and he lives alone. His ex-wife is a librarian, and he has an acceptably good relationship with her because of their three daughters. One day he meets Eunice Dunstead, who faintly reminds me of Muriel in an earlier Tyler novel, The Accidental Tourist. Liam and Eunice bond almost immediately, and Liam even says, “You’re the woman I love, and life is too short to go through it without you” (230).

Alas, life is not so simple, and numerous complications crowd in on Liam and his solitary life -- strangers, family, a job -- and Liam reflects on his life in great detail. On Christmas day, Liam visits with his daughter and grandchildren, but he opts for solitude. Tyler writes,

“It didn’t bother Liam that he would be spending Christmas Day on his own. He had a new book about Socrates that he was longing to get on with, and he’d picked up a rotisserie chicken from the Giant the day before (275) …

Before he settled in with his book, he put the chicken in the oven on low and he exchanged his sneakers for slippers. Then he switched on the lamp beside his favorite armchair. He sat down and opened the book and laid Jonah’s bookmark on the table next to him. He leaned back against the cushions with a contented sigh. All he lacked was a fireplace, he thought.

But that was all right. He didn’t need a fireplace.

Socrates said …What was it he had said? Something about the fewer his wants, the closer he was to the gods. And Liam really wanted nothing.” (276)

This novels has such a warm, sweet flow to it, I could barely put it down. It is a wonderful story, wonderfully told. I like Liam. I like Anne Tyler -- a whole great big whopping lot of like -- for both of them. Five stars

--Jim, 5/5/10

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i love anne tyler books. i find them moving, sometimes very sad sometimes funny but always thoughtful and engaging. i cannot say this for her last one; i was very eager to read it and i was prepared to enjoy it but i found it slim in plot, in ideas, generally i thought that it might be better as a

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short story. the main character did not convince me; the character of the girlfriend convinced me even less. people in the book had the 'outsider' traits of an anne tyler novel, odd people, unsual jobs, loners, etc but they were somehow without substance and conviction, it was a book where the reader was following a familiar path but was not engaged. did other people feel the same? i wonde

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Anne Tyler has a talent for getting to the core of even the most ordinary of lives. Her characters are real people making their way the best they can from one day to the next. Readers seeking thrilling plot elements or adventures will not find them in an Anne Tyler novel, but those wanting to learn

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more about the human condition and the humor to be found in everyday life will very much appreciate her work.

Liam Pennywell is a typical Anne Tyler character. Liam, at 60 years of age, does not consider his life to have been much of a success - and he is right about that. Unable to make a living in his area of expertise, Liam has fallen back on a career of teaching history at a private boys' school in Baltimore, a position that does not require from him so much as a formal teaching certificate. In the meantime, his two marriages have fallen apart and, at this point in his life, he is no longer close to his three daughters or his grandson. Liam lives alone and his only friend, even by the most generous definition of that word, is another of the teachers at the boys' school.

When Liam is suddenly downsized by the school, he decides to simplify his life by moving into a tiny apartment in a more downscale part of the city. He almost welcomes the fact that he has been forced into early retirement and is planning a lifestyle more appropriate to his reduced circumstances. After settling into the new apartment with the help of his one friend and his youngest daughter's boyfriend, Liam falls asleep in his new bedroom. He wakes up - in the hospital - and, although Liam has no memory of the event, it seems that sometime during the night an intruder entered his apartment through the unlocked patio door and knocked Liam unconscious before leaving empty-handed.

Liam feels as if the burglar has stolen part of his life and he is obsessed about regaining his lost memory of what actually happened that night. His search for someone to help him recover the memory leads him, almost accidentally, into a relationship with 38-year-old Eunice, a free-spirit of a woman who finds herself attracted to the older man. Liam is slow to recognize that Eunice is offering him a shot at the kind of joyfully spontaneous lifestyle he has never known. Then, when he finally figures it out, the idea scares him so much that he is not sure how to respond to what might be his last chance to make something interesting of his life.

"Noah's Compass" is about relationships and how people perceive each other. It explores Liam's inner world by taking a frank look at his relationship with his three daughters, his ex-wives, his grandson and the new woman who so unexpectedly enters his life. It is a book about having the courage to take chances, and how sometimes the biggest risk in life comes from a reluctance to gamble a bit before it is too late and the chance is lost forever.

Liam Pennywell tends to be a boring and timid man, one willing to shut down his life at the relatively young age of sixty, but his mistakes, and his little triumphs, have much to teach us. Readers will, I suspect, appreciate this novel more a few days after finishing it than they will upon immediately turning its final page. This one has to simmer a while.

Rated at: 3.5

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Liam Pennywell has been made redundant from his teaching job at the age of 60. He needs to economise so he moves to a smaller apartment further out of town. He wonders if losing his job is a sign that it’s time to move on to “the final stage, the summing-up stage”.

This is the opening of Anne

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Tyler’s 18th novel. Like all her others, it is set in Baltimore. Although Liam has lived alone for some years following the end of his second marriage, this novel is about his past and present relationships with other people, his family and others. This is familiar territory for those like me who have read a lot of Anne Tyler’s other work.

As in her other novels, the story of Noah’s Compass is gradually built up, it is a quiet, reflective novel about thoughts and feelings rather than a fast paced action-packed novel. Liam deals with what is happening to him by trying to focus on the positive side of it – paring down his possessions to prepare for the move is a chance to simplify his life.

Liam is proud of his memory but just after the move he wakes up in a hospital bed with no recollection of the knock on the head which caused him to be there. This does worry him and he sets out to find out. The loss of his job, the move and the gap in his memory force him to realise he is lonely, and he begins, very hesitantly, to re-establish relationships with his daughters, two adults and a 17 year old. His conversations with his family are often quite amusing and rather sad at the same time, as it becomes very clear that it is not just being hit on the head that is his problem, perhaps there is rather a lot he doesn’t know.

He is attracted to a younger woman because she seems to be someone who could help look after him, and a friendship, then a relationship slowly develops. But is there more to dowdy but caring Eunice than meets the eye? The Eunice storyline is important, but I didn’t like it that much, I had been drawn into the book enough to care about Liam and to think that there was something not quite right, that the romance didn’t convince me. I was much more interested in reading about Liam re-establishing relationships with his three daughters, particularly teenage Kitty who comes to stay with him after lots of fights with her mum.

I found this story of Liam’s first year of this new life a curiously absorbing read, and would recommend it to those who like this kind of quietly reflective, thoughtful fiction.

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I loved Digging to America and The Amateur Marriage, along with some other Anne Tyler books I can't recall right now, but this one was a real disappointment. Liam Pennywell seemed awfully similar to the main character in The Accidental Tourist. Even more troubling, I felt like she ran of out gas at

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the end. I don't think all novels require a happy ending, but I think there should be some resolution, some reason for telling this story. And for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why we were bought into these characters' lives.

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One of the interesting things about Anne Tyler's characters is the way they have aged as she has. In this novel the main character Liam is 61 years old and forced to retire. He uproots himself to move to a new apartment and is promptly assaulted. His friends and family gather round but he is

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adrift. Liam slowly learns to live a new life. There is humor here and the strengths and challenges of family, and lots of how most of us go through life clueless.

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When we meet Liam Pennywell's in the beginning of Noah's Compass his life is shrinking. Forced into early retirement, moving into a smaller apartment of his own free will, and deciding it's time to simplify, are the circumstances under which we are introduced. But a violent turn and a brief memory

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loss, force Liam out of his new comfort zone. Unwilling to relinquish even an unpleasant memory, Liam searches for someone who can help him regain his loss. His search leads him to an unlikely woman and an even unlikelier romance. Although Liam is a quiet loner, we find that he actually has many women, besides Eunice, complicating his life, sisters, ex-wife, daughters. They are dismayed by his recent choices to downsize and seem merely perplexed by Eunice and how she fits into his life. Just when we are relaxing and accepting Liam's relationship with the charming, girlish Eunice, Tyler throws us for a loop. We feel as foolish as Liam does for not realizing what seems all too obvious once we learn of this new twist. So, Liam must decide, do you grab happiness when you have a chance, even if it's wrong? Or do you let happiness pass you by?

This is a beautifulstory. The story line is clean and simple, mirroring Liam's desire for a uncomplicated life. When I started I just wanted to curl up with it and stay there until I finished

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I love Anne Tyler but I was disappointed by this book. The story failed to engage me as Liam failed to engage with his life.

Many of the characters in Noah's Compass are recycled from The Accidental Tourist and placed in different settings. There's Liam, the "not forthcoming" main character, cold, not involved in his own or anyone else's life. There's Eunice, the ditsy, blunt, accomplished though scattered love interest.

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And Barbara, the wife whose eyes have been opened to Liam's lack of humanity and she's moved on. The first 50 to 75 pages of this book invite you in, then you're left alone at the dining table with cold cereal in a cracked bowl.

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"In the sixty-first year of his life, Liam Pennywell lost his job." Well, now, you can't get much more timely than this. I'm a bit older than Liam, and so was my husband when the same thing happened to him, but still at a point in life when it leaves you wondering "Am I really finished with work?

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Am I ready to retire? Do I have other options?" Liam hasn't set the world on fire, to say the least, and now he's thinking he might just relax into his rocking chair with his books and wait for the end. Except that his rocking chair isn't all that comfortable, as it turns out. And everyone keeps asking him what he’s going to do “next”. And the first night he spends in his new, cheaper apartment he forgets to lock the patio door, and gets knocked out by an opportunistic burglar. (Not such a great opportunity for the burglar, either---Liam doesn't own one thing worth stealing.) He wakes up in the hospital with a bandaged head and no memory of anything past settling comfortably into his tightly made bed. He is much more disturbed by the lack of memory than by any other aspect of the event, a fact which neither his family, his doctor nor his friend Bundy seem to grasp. They all feel he should be grateful not to have a memory of being assaulted in his own apartment, but to Liam it’s an ongoing source of frustration. There isn’t a lot of plot in this novel; Tyler gives us life’s mundane moments, touched with a bit of short-lived excitement and a lot of introspection on the fly. As she has done before, (in The Accidental Tourist, for example) she creates a slightly disconnected male character who has functioned well enough up to a point in his life, but seems to have no inner core of support when life stops being routine, and who finds himself drawn to a woman whose appeal is that she fits no familiar pattern. Unfortunately, he rather pins his hopes for recovering his memory and turning his life around on this woman, who clearly isn’t wrapped too tightly at the core herself. I almost always enjoy Anne Tyler’s characters, even when I want to give them a good shake and a swift kick in the butt. This time was no exception.

Review written in January 2016

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I haven't read an Anne Tyler for a while, so I anticipated this vacation read and it didn't let me down!

When I read Tyler I am struck by the ordinariness of the world she creates. It makes me want to open my eyes wider and look around at my own life and see what is happening!

The irony is that

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Liam, the main character in this story, is utterly unable to notice the world around him. He has recently been let go at the school where he was teaching 5th grade, he should have complained that he had seniority, but why bother. Because of his shrinking salary he moved to a much smaller and less desirable apartment, and the first night he spends in this new apartment he is attacked by a thief and wakes in the hospital.

When he awakes, he remembers nothing of the attack. Because he can't remember the events that brought him to the hospital he is utterly fixated on his memory loss. Fixated in a way that he has not experienced before. The reader finds that out as his ex-wife and three daughters enter his hospital room and his apartment and his life. Liam was clearly not a part of their lives - at least not on purpose!

And so this story follows Liam as he 'wakes' up to mess he has created by not being present even when he was.

I loved this book.

I love the way Tyler creates her characters. I have a feeling I would not really like Liam if I were to meet him in my work. But on the pages, it is completely different!

Instead, I loved the way Liam relished in his aloneness until he was really alone and in that moment he understood what he had missed. I loved the relationship that he created with Eunice Dunstead, a professional rememberer. And I loved his relationships with his daughters - each one completely different and yet quite the same.

This is a quiet book about a huge event. And I loved it!!

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I don’t believe that Anne Tyler is capable of writing a bad book, but some I like more than others and, unfortunately, this isn’t one of those. It’s the story of a man with very little to live for: a middle-aged out-of-work schoolmaster with two failed marriages behind him, three children who

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don’t like him very much, and almost no friends. When he’s attacked in his own apartment, there’s nobody to bring him home from hospital but his ex-wife, who does so only out of duty. He strikes up a relationship with a younger woman whose own life is almost as empty as his, but she’s wary and secretive with, as it turns out, good reason. He ends up reconciling with his family to some degree, and finding himself a job of sorts, and seems perfectly happy with his lot – in fact, he never seems particularly discontented; he appears to have very low expectations – but I found the whole thing quite depressing. Oddly, the Daily Telegraph review quoted on the back cover refers to the book as a ‘comedy’, and the strapline on the cover is “You might just find more than you lose …” Possibly I missed something. (Also, I fail to see what the cover image has to do with anything.)

This struck a chord though, although not a very harmonious one: “I’m always thinking, Why don’t I have any hobbies? Other people do. Other people develop their passions; they collect things, or they birdwatch, or they snorkel. They join book groups, or they re-enact the Civil War. I’m just trying to make it through to bedtime every night.”

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I gave up on it up about a quarter of the way through. The story is very slow moving, and the main character is dull.

I liked her presentation of melancholy as a gentle companion.

Liam Pennywell is man with a whole lot of nothing going on in his life. He's 60 years old, divorced, he isn't close to his three daughters, and has just been laid off from his job as a fifth grade history teacher. Liam decides to downsize himself and moves into a smaller apartment. On the first

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night he's there, he's attached and knocked unconscious. He wakes up in the hospital with no idea how he got there or what happened to him.

Liam becomes obsessed with getting his memory back. When he meets a woman, Eunice, who seems to be a rememberer of sorts, he starts to drone on about all the disappoints in his life --- two failed marriages, three daughters who barely know him and he makes no effort to know them, a grandchild he doesn't know, and, most startling to him, he seems to have no interests in anything. He begins to feel as if he's drifting with no purpose or goal. Eunice becomes entangled in his life and he finds he likes it. The new relationship brings an odd joy to him and he starts getting to know his youngest daughter and grandchild as well. When things become complicated, he once again looks back on his life and all he lost and found.

One of the things I like about Anne Tyler is her ability to take an ordinary person and situation and make it fascinating. There isn't anything about Liam that is out of the ordinary. His problems are ones we're all acquainted with. We don't have to imagine what his problems would be like because we have most likely experienced something very similar. It's the vagaries of everyday life that Tyler seems to work best with. We all wonder about what we've done and where we might be going. There's a familiarity that brings the characters to life.

In my opinion, this book was not one of Tyler's best, but I still enjoyed it. She drops you into a story and you feel as if you've always belonged with these characters. I got hooked and when it ended, rather abruptly, I felt slightly cheated, as if I wasn't done looking over Liam's shoulder and contemplating life and what it should be. I also love that this book is set in Baltimore. It's near my city and I like being able to pick out landmarks. If you're an Anne Tyler fan, or not, Noah's Compass is worth a read.

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I can't recall the last time I stuck with a book from beginning to end that was as monotonous as Tyler's latest work. The only thing that prevented me from giving up halfway through was her reputation (this was my first taste of Tyler's work). I could have used one of the author's fictional

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"rememberers" throughout the book to answer a question I repeatedly asked myself: "so just WHAT is this about again?" The only thing that saved "Noah's Compass" from 2 or 2 1/2 stars was Tyler's writing prowess. In the end, however, even the talented word merchant can't save this tome from being branded mediocre.

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A 60-year old man, Liam, who has lost two wives, one through death and one through divorce, has also lost his job, a teacher at a second-rate private school. He moves into a smaller apartment and is burglarized his first night there. His injuries have caused him to forget everything about the

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incident, much to his dismay and everyone else's indifference. And then he meets and develops an odd relationship with an also odd woman who is a professional “rememberer” for her boss. At this late stage, Liam finally seems to realize that he wasn't much of a father or a husband and occasionally vacillates between wanting closer relationships and wanting to be left alone. His youngest daughter, still a teenager, doesn't give him much of a left-alone option.

Despite Liam's obvious flaws, he is a likeable character, at least in my opinion. So are his daughters and his ex-wife, all in their own flawed ways. This isn't an action-packed, “what's going to happen next?” book, but I found it to be a sweet, quick read about tangled families.

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This book is a novel about Liam Pennywell who studied philosophy but ended up getting laid off from a job teaching fifth grade at a second rate private school. He is at the age where he decides to downsize and moves to a newer, smaller apartment in a different area of town. He goes to bed in his

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new apartment on his first night and then wakes up in the hospital and has no idea how he got there.

He is very troubled about this gap in memory and sets out trying to find out what happened. And he finds something else.

Liam is a guy who lived his whole life without really engaging with it. I know people like that, do you? This book is about them.

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Not as good a read as other Anne Tylers. Maybe I have just read too many of them.

This lovely novel reminds me of how often I've enjoyed Anne Tyler's characters. I am always moved when she writes of family and depression and the unfulfilled life. And here she writes just a perfect, quiet final act.

Newly "retired" gentleman decides to scale down his life, but wakes up in a hosptial room. The story tells the emotional travels he endures with finding new love, dissing his overbearing ex-wife, relating with his teenage daughter, and eldest daughters son and ultimately refinding himself and a new

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way of life.

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I listened to the audible version of this book. At times I found it so slow, and Liam so annoying, that I almost gave up on it. I expected that solving the mystery of how he came to lose his memory would be critical to the plot, and was disappointed to find it was just a device. On the other hand,

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I liked the overall exploration of memory as well as the focus on a not-young stage of life.

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A simple, but charming tale. Not a lot happens in this story, but it is a thoughtful description of a man entering old age and downsizing his life in general. Like many of us....his life has been varied and interesting, with no high drama, but a feeling of contentment and acceptance envelops him at

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the end of the story. Those looking for pace and excitement will not appreciate this novel, but it is worth a read for it's human interest alone.

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I always like to read the other reviews before I write mine. I find the most positive reviews are the ones that really sense what Ann Tyler is doing. She creates real people that are slightly tilted. Her insights are clever" her vocabulary get better when she was criticizing" I thought that was a

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great line. Her characters always seem to grow. I found a feeling of hopefulness for Liam by the time the book ended. He has a better sense of who he was and what he wants his life to be. I did have trouble with the portrayal of someone 60 being "old" in the way that Liam was put together by Ms. Tyler. I did enjoy this book more than "Digging to America". Having read 7 books by Ann Tyler, I am always willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

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