Noah's Compass

Yesterday after meeting my class I went to a shopping center in the big city near the college I commute to because I'd seen a beautiful peacock scarf there this past weekend and had finally come up with a good rationalization for why it had to be mine. (Now it is; see my new profile photo.) And I can't go to a shopping center without visiting the bookstore, and of course can't leave the bookstore empty-handed, so I came home with the new Anne Tyler novel, Noah's Compass, and finished it before I went to bed last night.

I think Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is Anne Tyler's masterpiece, and that the one right after it and the four right before it are almost as good. I didn't like the last seven or the first four novels nearly as much, so I wasn't expecting a lot from this new one. I thought maybe I just wasn't old enough yet to sympathize with her older characters. (Here's a list of Anne Tyler's novels in case you don't have the order memorized!)

But then I met Liam Pennywell, and he's a lot like me, even though he is older. Here's how we're introduced to him:
In the sixty-first year of his life, Liam Pennywell lost his job. It wasn't such a good job, anyhow. He'd been teaching fifth grade in a second-rated private boys' school. Fifth grade wasn't even what he'd been trained for. Teaching wasn't what he'd been trained for. His degree was in philosophy. Oh, don't ask."
I know so many people lately who feel a bit like that--"oh, don't ask." One of them has a PhD in philosophy and has been laid off from her job as a young adult librarian since last summer. Three of them have been looking for work for over a year. Another, of course, is me. I have part-time jobs, but none of them are what I was "trained" to do or how I thought I was going to make my mark on the world. What Liam is facing-- like the rest of us--is the distinct possibility that he's never going to make any kind of mark.

Liam is having issues with memory after a knock on the head, and at one point wonders why his sister can remember more than he can about their childhood. He wants a "rememberer," someone who can remind him of things. I actually have rememberers; I have Iris for high school memories, Miriam for college memories, and recently I've started calling on Laura for graduate school memories.

Also Liam's reaction to one of his daughter's attempts to share her religion with him is similar to my reaction in a similar situation:
"He refrained from telling her that even talking about religion made him wince with embarrassment. Even hearing about it embarrassed him--hearing those toe-curling terms that believers employed like share, in fact, and my faith."

Occasionally Liam makes a grand gesture, like telling the woman he loves that he can't live without her, but he doesn't follow up on that gesture and lets her go. I don't identify with him there at all; in fact, his rigidness and passivity irritate me. Later he does make a grand gesture with one of his daughters, though:
"In desperation, he pushed his chair back and slid forward until he was kneeling on the patio. He could feel the unevenness of the flagstones through the fabric of his trousers; he could feel the ache of misery filling his throat. Xanthe froze, gaping at him, still holding her dishes. 'Please,' he said, clasping his hands in front of him. 'I can't bear to know I made such a bad mistake. I can't endure it. I'm begging you, Xanthe.'"
The gesture is just what was needed. The theatricality of it reminds me of the time my parents were sitting in a booth in a restaurant and my mother pushed my father's shoulder away in annoyance; he made himself fall out of the booth and onto the floor, just to exaggerate how hard she'd pushed.

Noah's Compass is a quiet and occasionally bleak story, but the undercurrents seem to me to bring it closer to the magic of those novels from Tyler's middle period. Liam thinks "we live such tangled, fraught lives...." and who can't identify with that? Every morning and evening I'm holding my breath while my 16-year-old continues learning to drive in the snow that keeps falling every night. Fraught, yes, and in a year or so I probably won't remember it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't push at my life in a certain direction.

Are you one of those lucky people who had a plan for what you were going to do when you grew up and got to follow it? Or are you like Liam and me, who got knocked off course and ended up in places we never expected to go?