Anne Tyler is known and loved for her character studies—delicate and perceptive probings into imperfect, achingly familiar lives. Noah's Compass, her 18th novel, is the latest in a long line of these profiles of a character exploring, within the boundaries of family obligations, the possibilities of stepping outside an otherwise uneventful existence. When Liam Pennywell is nearly 61, he loses his job teaching fifth grade at St. Dyfrig, a "second-rate" boys' school in Baltimore. He's been downsized, not fired, he's quick to point out to inquisitive family members, and he never really liked being a teacher anyway—"those interminable after-school meetings and the reams of niggling paperwork." Liam's degree and lifelong interest was in philosophy, but "things seemed to have taken a downward turn a long, long time ago." Within the week, Liam moves to a one-bedroom apartment near the Baltimore Beltway and begins his own systematic downsizing, tossing out magazines, never-used dissertation note cards and furniture until he can fit all of his possessions into a 14-foot U-Haul truck. The first night in his sparse new home Liam is attacked by an intruder—an event he can't remember when he wakes up the next day in the hospital, bandaged and bruised. And so unfolds the next stage in Liam's quiet life, in which he reopens himself to the possibility of love, while finally accepting the fact that his relationships with his father and daughters are fixed, whatever their flaws may be. Tyler's acutely perceptive observations of family interactions are dead on, like when Liam realizes that he and his father have virtually nothing to say to one another. "Why," she writes, "did Liam have to learn this all over again on every visit?" She gradually paints her portrait of this ordinary, uncomplicated man, spending Christmas alone, but with "an okay place to live, a good enough job. A book to read. A chicken in the oven . . . solvent, if not rich, and healthy." Like Noah without a compass, bobbing up and down with nowhere to go, Liam leaves us wondering about our own later years, and what will bring us peace, or regrets.  Deborah Donovan writes from La Veta, Colorado.

 

"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

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.)