I have been enveloped by Anne Tyler’s Baltimore for almost 15 years. Her characters’ losses, epiphanies, and mid-life crises have formed an entire world of their own – a world of subtle and unexpected epiphanies. This is the beauty of Tyler’s writing – it unfailingly focuses on the characters, not the external plot.
In Noah’s Compass, a middle-aged, twice-married man, Liam Pennywell, goes to bed in a new apartment and wakes up in the hospital, the victim of a robbery. Though he is relatively unharmed, the attack figuratively wakes Liam from his sleepy life. What happens to him isn’t logistically dramatic; it is, instead, his attempt to sync his emotions with the reality of his life. He simply cannot feel completely connected to his own life – and though the memory loss from the attack is the beginning of his epiphany, Liam can’t help but notice he’s always felt this way.
As Liam meanders though his own crisis, his family and friends skitter around the edges with their own sad beauty: their unhappy marriages; their misunderstood youths; their abandonment issues; their out-of-style harem pants. They are colorful and pathetic and heartbreaking – as is Liam, as is the entire novel.
Though it is possible to read almost any of Tyler’s novels and expect that the main character will have a “my life isn’t what I thought” breakdown, there is always something unique about each one, always something comforting about the way Tyler writes with such gentle depth.
Noah’s Compass is beautifully and perfectly Anne Tyler.
