Noah's Compass

2010_2_5 NOAH’S COMPASS
I am a long time fan of the novels of Anne Tyler. I have read them all through PATCHWORK PLANET, but for various reasons I didn’t read the next three. When I went to my local Barnes and Noble the other day I saw number 18 had just been published, NOAH’S COMPASS, so I bought it and read it in two days. I liked being back in contact with the peculiar ambience around her ambivalent characters. I have promised myself to catch up on the three I missed as they came out.
The central character is a sad-sack poor-man’s philosopher named Liam Pennywell. Although his college degree is in Philosophy, he is at 60 year old man teaching 5th Grade at a run-down private school in Baltimore. The Baltimore area is Tyler country in almost all her novels and she has lived there herself for many years. Things haven’t quite turned out like Pennywell had hoped when he was younger; indeed, he had just been downsized by the school. Because of the recession the school was forced to consolidate the two 5th grade classes into one and, despite the fact Liam had been there longer than the other teacher, they kept the other guy and let Liam go. It didn’t seem right but he was not one to kick up a fuss. Things happen; life was like that. Actually, he felt early retirement wasn’t such a bad idea; it had a certain allure for him. He was so frugal and lived very simply that he had some savings, but the first thing he felt he had to do was move to a cheaper apartment. The book opens with him and two friends making that move. However, it was just his bad luck to be assaulted by an intruder his first night in the apartment. He had gone to bed and woke up in a hospital with a bump on his head and a gash on his hand where the burglar had bit his hand in the struggle that ensued.
The injuries didn’t bother Liam half as much as the fact he had no memory of the obvious struggle he had put up. The intruder took nothing except an experience that he may never consciously recapture. He was inordinately upset over the loss of that ‘dead zone’ in his memory. He didn’t care if was traumatic he felt rob of that experience. There was a hole in his life and he didn’t like it one bit. A doctor he consults makes light of the loss memory. He tells him to forget it; it’s no big deal, or at least it shouldn’t be. Other people tell him the same thing. But Liam, not able to let it go, happens to meets a sympathetic soul, a woman named Eunice who has an unusual job. She is employed by an elderly rich man with a memory problem; he has hired her as his “rememberer,” someone to keep tracked of what he does on any given day and what he needed to do the next day. She seemed to tune right into Liam unhappiness and dilemma over the lost experience. They seem to hit it off right away. When one of Liam’s daughters meets Eunice she tells her dad “that woman has a crush on you.” And the next thing you know, they have become a couple. They have a lot of affection for each other but not yet sleeping together because one his daughters has moved in with him because she can’t get along with her mother, Liam’s ex-wife; plus Eunice lived at home with a father recovering from a serious stroke. (Going to a motel never seemed to occur to them.) In addition, his other two daughters and his ex-wife come by frequently without warning or calling first. In fact, Barbara, his ex-wife came in once just as Eunice was unbuckling Liam’s belt, as she wanted sex then and there. But Liam has the bad habit of never locking his doors and his family members have the impoliteness of always barging in without knocking first. He also has to do a lot of schlepping of family members and a boy friend of Kitty’s, the daughter who lives with him. But he loves Eunice despite her plainness, chubbiness, and numerous quirks and total lack of getting on in the world. She can’t cook worth a lick and is socially inept. She is a funny bunny of a female, very ordinary but with a vein of eccentricity, which appeals to Liam, who is also normal but odd at the same time. He is no particular bargain either, as he is a slovenly dresser and not particularly handsome, and hasn’t been seen naked by a woman for a very long time, which makes him plenty nervous. They are Tyler people; I’d recognize then anywhere. And Eunice is only 38, quite a bit younger than Liam. Still, they love each other and both want things to work out.
But then a fateful coincidence occurs, of all places, in line at the supermarket. He runs into Eunice’s mother who he had never met before, and she informs him in passing that Eunice is married. One can imagine the shock. When Liam confronts her she cries and cries and profusely apologizes. Liam is uncertain what to do, as he is attached to her, but on the other hand he knows he doesn’t want to destroy a marriage because that’s what his father did to his family and his mother never recovered. The two of them go back and forth for a while. His father’s argument for divorcing his mother to go off with a “femme fatale” was “you have to grab happiness when you can.” But Liam is incapable of feeling that way even though it likely means a lonely old age for him. On the other hand, he would have his beloved philosophers to sustain him. Shortly after he meets Eunice’s husband, who impresses him as an all right guy, he makes his final decision: he’s going to break it off with her, and he does. The book ends with him working as an aide in a preschool and going home to his apartment where Kitty is still living with him. The last we hear of him he is sitting at home reading Plato. What I’ll remember is what he says about himself halfway through the book. “I just don’t seem to have the hang of things, somehow. It’s as if I’ve never been entirely present in my own life.” Amen!
Why, a reader might ask, is the novel titled NOAH’S COMPASS when there is no character by that name in the novel? It’s a fair question. Well, there is a short section midway through the book when Liam baby sits his grandson, Jonah, whose mother is an overzealous Christian, where he explains to the lad, who is four years old, the story of Noah’s ark. It bothers the boy that Noah left so many animals behind to drown. When he asks Liam where did the ark stop for gas, he explains it had no motor or, for that matter, no sails because it had nowhere to go; the only aim of the ark was to float while the rest of the world drowned. It just bobbed up and down without a compass, rudder, or sextant. He tells Jonah, “Noah didn’t need to figure out directions, because the whole world was underwater and so it made no difference.” So the image of Noah’s Compass and the fact it is useless when everything “was under water,” becomes a metaphor for Liam who is a nowhere man bobbing up and down on a flood he doesn’t understand very well, despite his reading of Plato.
Finally, once he connects with Eunice, and even after they break up, he forgets all about that lost experience he longed for at the beginning of the story. Larger issues have drowned it out.