From Anne Tyler, a wise, gently humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about a retired school teacher forced to re-evaluate his life.
Liam Pennywell has never liked teaching at a run-down private school, so when he is forced to retire at sixty-one, it doesn't bother him. But what does is having no memory of an assailant who attacked him on the first night after he moved to his efficient condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. He's driven to recover this memory and at the same time recover other moments of his life that he has, over time, forgotten. But he can't do it alone. What he needs is a "hired rememberer" - someone who will do the remembering for him - but when he finds Eunice, he gets a whole lot more than he anticipated.
Subtle, funny, and populated with characters that are as real as friends, Noah's Compass is an engaging and revealing novel about coming to terms with change, family, love, and memory. "Tyler's narratives feel intimate and recognizable, as if we're flipping through an album of snapshots belonging to a relative or neighbor."
-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"What [Tyler] does is tell a simple, straight-ahead story in prose that is so beguiling, you barely feel that you've read it. You feel almost as if you've experienced it, and along the way made a new batch of likeable friends."
-Winnipeg Free Press Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is her eighteenth novel. Breathing Lessons was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Tyler is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland. 1
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-rate 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. Things seemed to have taken a downward turn a long, long time ago, and perhaps it was just as well that he had seen the last of St. Dyfrig's dusty, scuffed corridors and those interminable after-school meetings and the reams of niggling paperwork.
In fact, this might be a sign. It could be just the nudge he needed to push him on to the next stage-the final stage, the summing-up stage. The stage where he sat in his rocking chair and reflected on what it all meant, in the end.
He had a respectable savings account and the promise of a pension, so his money situation wasn't out-and-out desperate. Still, he would have to economize. The prospect of economizing interested him. He plunged into it with more enthusiasm than he'd felt in years-gave up his big old-fashioned apartment within the week and signed a lease on a smaller place, a one-bedroom-plus-den in a modern complex out toward the Baltimore Beltway. Of course this meant paring down his possessions, but so much the better. Simplify, simplify! Somehow he had accumulated far too many encumbrances. He tossed out bales of old magazines and manila envelopes stuffed with letters and three shoe boxes of index cards for the dissertation that he had never gotten around to writing. He tried to palm off his extra furniture on his daughters, two of whom were grown-ups with places of their own, but they said it was too shabby. He had to donate it to Goodwill. Even Goodwill refused his couch, and he ended up paying 1-800-GOT-JUNK to truck it away. What was left, finally, was compact enough that he could reserve the next-smallest-size U-Haul, a fourteen-footer, for moving day.
On a breezy, bright Saturday morning in June, he and his friend Bundy and his youngest daughter's boyfriend lugged everything out of his old apartment and set it along the curb. (Bundy had decreed that they should develop a strategy before they started loading.) Liam was reminded
