Brenda's Book Bash

Noah's Compass, by Anne Tyler (Knopf, 2010)

One of Anne Tyler’s particular gifts is titling her books. Though we don’t know why the story of Liam Pennywell is called Noah’s Compass until more than midway through, we already sense the existential crisis at the center of the book, the emptiness and meaninglessness that this Everyman is facing. This is one of Tyler’s bleaker works, one in which this particular pilgrim’s search for meaning flounders in his own constricted, directionless life.

The Tyler books I admire most are the ones in which the climactic event occurs rather early and the rest of the narrative is, in a sense, falling action, more denouement than one normally gets in a novel. By the end of chapter one, we know that Liam, 61 and divorced, has just lost his job teaching in what he proclaims to be a second-rate private school, a situation that he rationalizes by acknowledging that he never cared for the profession, that he had taken the job as a high school history teacher in a prestigious private school, but was eventually forced by circumstances to a 5th-grade class within the “dusty, scuffed corridors” of St. Dyfrig’s, home to “interminable after-school meetings and reams of niggling paperwork.” This lifelong occupation was a default setting for the philosophy graduate student, whose studies were interrupted by a family tragedy many years ago. As the novel begins, he is moving to a cheaper apartment on the outskirts of Baltimore with the help of his youngest daughter’s boyfriend, Damian, and his friend, Bundy, a gym teacher from St. Dysfrig. Both Damian and Bundy are amazed and amused by Liam’s lack of possessions and his ability to live without a computer, as they help him arrange his basic furniture and books. After they leave, Liam takes stock of his new digs, and then abruptly wakes up in a hospital, the victim of an apparent robbery assault about which he remembers nothing, and which ironically netted nothing at all for the criminal. His solitary lifestyle comes to an end since he now must be at least temporarily dependent on the reluctant help from his ex-wife and daughters while he recovers from his head injury.

Liam struggles for the rest of the novel with the question of his suppressed memories of the attack. He himself cannot express exactly why he wants so desperately to remember an event everyone tries to convince him that he’s better off not pondering. Though he never does regain that night, his questions about the nature of memory force him to reveal a lifetime of small tragedies and sacrifices, of repressed feelings and unexpressed resentments for the people around him. Self-sacrifice is always a prominent theme in Tyler’s work and sometimes seems to be its own reward, but in Liam’s case, this selflessness leaves him hollow.

His chance meeting with Eunice, the professional “rememberer” for a prominent businessman in the beginning stages of dementia, sets in motion an unlikely love affair and introduces another of Tyler’s most appealing trademarks, the quirky love interest that sometimes signals a chance for redemption. Not so in this one. Though Tyler’s books are filled with characters like Eunice, whose very ordinariness is described in such colorful and vivid terms as to make them somehow extraordinary, this time around there’s a shadiness, a whiff of dishonesty about her that even her humorous frumpiness does not disguise.

Eunice does, however unwittingly, serve the purpose he sought her out for to begin with. Her infidelities set in motion a series of revelations that force Liam to evaluate a lifetime of damaged family relationships. The most meaningful relationships Liam manages to resuscitate are with his youngest daughter, Kitty, who prefers living with him to living with her mother, and his grandson, Jonah, whose mother, Louise, is Liam’s fundamentalist Christian daughter. His daughter Xanthe, whose dead mother was Liam’s first wife, is the most resentful of Liam’s emotional absence from her life, which she confronts him with late in the novel. When he tells her that he wants to let Kitty stay with him after his convalescence, Xanthe finally lets out the feelings she’s held back for years. “'When you never let me live with you!’ Xanthe cried. 'And I was just a child! And you were all I had! I was way younger than Kitty is when you and Barbara split up. You left me behind with a woman who wasn’t even related to me and off you went, forever!'” Liam’s shock at her statement may sound callous (as in, how could he not know that would hurt her?) but is a symptom of his deep emotional paralysis, something he covers up with his incessant moralizing and philosophizing.

The truth of the character is that he is a stranger to everyone, most especially himself. This is never more clear than in his dealings with his grandson, Jonah, whose bible story coloring book provides the reference point for the title of the book. They bond early in the book when Jonah asks his grandfather for the lowdown on some of the stories depicted in his book. (A coloring book is an aptly chosen artifact, in that it presents the outline of picture, requiring the viewer to fill in the emptiness.) Late in the novel, Jonah expresses disdain for Noah because he lets so many animals die when he picks two of each for his voyage. In the ensuing conversation, Jonah asks if Noah’s ark was a sailboat. Liam replies, “'I guess he didn’t need sails, because he wasn’t going anywhere…There was nowhere to go. He was just trying to stay afloat. He was just bobbing up and down, so he didn’t need a compass, or a rudder, or a sextant…'” When Jonah asks him what a sextant is, he replies, “'I believe it’s something that figures out directions by the stars. But Noah didn’t need to figure out directions, because the whole world was underwater and so it made no difference.'”

By the end of this strange, emotionally blunted novel, Liam has become a volunteer at a daycare center, where he works with three year olds at the “Texture Table” where they learn by touching things like sand and clay and by fingerprinting, which the teacher thinks “expanded the soul,” an idea Liam finds ridiculous, though, as usual, he plays along. As he plans a solitary Christmas day with a new book on Socrates and a rotisserie chicken from the local supermarket, we gather, I think, that not much has changed, that the knocking loose of the past with the blow to the head has done nothing much at all to change the present, and that all the remembering might just be another way of forgetting.