Noah’s Compass: A Novel

By Anne Tyler
Knopf, $25.95, 288 pages

Liam Pennywell has just been downsized from his teaching position at a private school. Since he’s 60, he’s mostly settled on retiring now. He downsizes into a smaller, simpler apartment, and after the first night he’s slept there, Liam finds himself in a hospital room, recovering from an injury he can’t remember incurring. Distressed not so much by the break-in to his apartment (in which nothing was stolen because he owns nothing of value), but by the inability to remember “a piece of his life,” Liam tries to figure out a way to recover the missing memory. His effort to do so leads him on a path he wouldn’t have imagined.

Anne Tyler, as always, creates a cast of characters who are average people living mostly mundane lives, when one small twist of fate knocks them out of their orbits. Liam is a man who has never expected much nor contributed much and has seemed mostly content, and the twist in Noah’s Compass leads him to re-examine his life — or, rather, examine it for the first time.

“Women had this element of treachery, Liam had discovered. They entered your life under false pretenses and then they changed the rules. Underneath, Barbara had turned out to be just like all the others.”

Tyler’s newest is not her best, lacking more depth that could make it great, but it should largely satisfy those who are fans of her work.

Reviewed by Cathy Carmode Lim