Noah's Compass
Anne Tyler
Praise for
Noah’s Compass
“[Anne Tyler] practices … what the ancients called the ‘ars celare artem’—the art that conceals art. With apparent effortlessness, this Pulitzer Prize–winning author simply plunges us into the troubled hearts of her characters and allows us to recognize in their confusions our own riven selves. Like Tolstoy or Chekhov, Ms. Tyler has made herself a chronicler of family happiness and unhappiness.… The yearning to recover something he has lost, something missing, gradually leads [the main character] toward what just might be a whole new life.… throughout Noah’s Compass—as in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and many other [Tyler] novels—she reveals, with unobtrusive mastery, the disconcerting patchwork of comedy and pathos that marks all our lives.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Pure pleasure going down … Simply put, Tyler is a consummate psychologist whose sensitive exploration of the less-than-gritty range of human experience illuminates the sealed-up places inside us.… We’ve all felt as lost as Liam Pennywell does within his oh-so-ordinary life.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Those of us who love Anne Tyler know that uncomfortable nudge, that promise of an unknown next stage. In one tragicomic novel after another, we’ve seen frightened, disoriented people—just like us—pushed out of their comfort zones into quirky occupations and difficult family arrangements.… [A] sensitive, witty story about a man who’s forced to realize he’s not dead yet.”
—The Washington Post
“Everyone loves Anne Tyler, and her eighteenth novel will doubtless supply another reason. Wry and affectionate, Noah’s Compass reads quickly, in language so plain and simple it carries the aura of a folktale.… Its story goes down like eggnog.… Rueful and goodhearted.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A quirky novel about a lonely man, interrupted … a characteristically offbeat delight.”
—O: The Oprah Magazine
“With a masterful touch, [Tyler] transforms a passive sixty-one-year-old teacher into a sympathetic figure. Fired from his job, Liam Pennywell moves into a small apartment and wakes up the next morning in the hospital with head injuries he can’t explain. What turns out to have been an attack by a thief leads to unexpected grace, as Liam is forced to engage more deeply with his family and with a woman who finds him irrestistible.”
—More magazine
“Tyler’s artistry and intelligence are both firmly in evidence in her newest novel—as are the compassion and deep well of melancholy that run through her best work.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“Anne Tyler is known and loved for her character studies—delicate and perceptive probing into imperfect, achingly familiar lives.… Liam leaves us wondering about our own later years, and what will bring us peace, or regrets.”
—BookPage
“Gracefully written.”
—USA Today
“A quietly beautiful story of regular people … [a] satisfying midwinter read.”
—77 Square
“In typical lovely form, Anne Tyler takes a twisting approach to an arresting premise.… Most engaging … [Her] writing is as lovely and transparent as ever.… Surely it is one of the best compliments I can pay Noah’s Compass that I longed to drag Liam out of his armchair and into the noisy world.”
—The Boston Globe
“Tyler captures, with grace and good humor, the shifts in the relationships between parents and children, husbands and wives, likers and lovers, wrought by the passage of time. She reminds us that although sensitive people cannot—and should not—avoid “The Great Sadness” that accompanies an existence that is fleeting and might be meaningless, they don’t have to dwell there.… It’s a quiet, yet effective, tale—and one that feels as comfortable as your favorite sweater.”
—Baltimore Sun
“Anne Tyler is a novelist who has elevated the pitch-perfect observation of everyday detail into an art form. There are moments in her [Noah’s Compass] where her prose is so unassuming, so exact in the placement of each word, that it is easy to let it glide over you like an overheard conversation, failing to realize quite how brilliantly it is executed.… Dazzling … a beautifully subtle book, an elegant contemplation of what it means to be happy and the consequences of a defensive withdrawal from other people. Life, Tyler seems to say, is at its best when we let it be messy and unstructured; when [we] allow ourselves to color outside the lines.”
—The Observer (UK)
“Like her near-contemporaries Alice Munro and Carol Shields, Tyler has always been drawn to life’s unheroic survivors.… Comforting and cadenced.”
—The Independent (UK)
“Tyler has long been a brilliant anatomiser of everyday life.… Her characters find one another, drift apart and (if they are lucky) come together again—but her novels have a grace and an emotional depth that few romances can match.… A pleasure.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
“Hers is a fine-grained art.… It is human nature that she evidently finds infinitely fascinating and surprising, with its constantly unforeseeable capacity for change.… Noah’s Compass is immensely readable. It displays many of Tyler’s finest qualities: her sharp observation of humanity, her wry comedy, the luminous accuracy of her descriptions.… Cause for celebration.”
—The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
“A heartening novel about modern urban life.”
—The Daily Telegraph (UK)
ALSO BY ANNE TYLER
Digging to America
The Amateur Marriage
Back When We Were Grownups
A Patchwork Planet
Ladder of Years
Saint Maybe
Breathing Lessons
The Accidental Tourist
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Morgan’s Passing
Earthly Possessions
Searching for Caleb
Celestial Navigation
The Clock Winder
A Slipping-Down Life
The Tin Can Tree
If Morning Ever Comes
Noah’s Compass is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2010 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Anne Tyler
Reading group guide copyright © 2010 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
RANDOM HOUSE READER’S CIRCLE and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Borzoi Books, an imprint of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2009.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tyler, Anne.
Noah’s compass : a novel / by Anne Tyler.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27333-8
1. Older men—Fiction. 2. Retirees—Fiction. 3. Old age—Psychological aspects—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.Y45N63 2009
813’.54—dc22 2009014925
www.randomhousereaderscircle.com
Cover design: Victoria Allen
Cover photograph: Laura Braun/Millennium Images, UK
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Also by Anne Tyler
Title Page
>
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
A Reader’s Guide
About the Author
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 of a photographic series that he’d seen in one of those magazines he had just thrown away. National Geographic? Life? Different people from different parts of the world had posed among their belongings in various outdoor settings. There was a progression from the contents of the most primitive tribesman’s hut (a cooking pot and a blanket, in Africa or some such) to a suburban American family’s football-field-sized assemblage of furniture and automobiles, multiple TVs and sound systems, wheeled racks of clothing, everyday china and company china, on and on and on. His own collection, which had seemed so scanty in the gradually emptying rooms of his apartment, occupied an embarrassingly large space alongside the curb. He felt eager to whisk it away from public view. He snatched up the nearest box even before Bundy had given them the go-ahead.
Bundy taught phys ed at St. Dyfrig. He was a skeletal, blue-black giraffe of a man, frail by the looks of him, but he could lift astonishing weights. And Damian—a limp, wilted seventeen-year-old—was getting paid for this. So Liam let the two of them tackle the heavy stuff while he himself, short and stocky and out of shape, saw to the lamps and the pots and pans and other light objects. He had packed his books in small cartons and so those he carried too, stacking them lovingly and precisely against the left inner wall of the van while Bundy singlehandedly wrestled with a desk and Damian tottered beneath an upside-down Windsor chair balanced on top of his head. Damian had the posture of a consumptive—narrow, curved back and buckling knees. He resembled a walking comma.
The new apartment was some five miles from the old one, a short jaunt up North Charles Street. Once the van was loaded, Liam led the way in his car. He had assumed that Damian, who was below the legal age for driving a rental, would ride shotgun in the van with Bundy, but instead he slid in next to Liam and sat in a jittery silence, chewing on a thumbnail and lurking behind a mane of lank black hair. Liam couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him. When they stopped for the light at Wyndhurst he contemplated asking how Kitty was, but he decided it might sound odd to inquire about his own daughter. Not until they were turning off Charles did either of them speak, and then it was Damian. “Swingin’ bumper sticker,” he said.
Since there were no cars ahead of them, Liam knew it had to be his own bumper sticker Damian meant. (BUMPER STICKER, it read—a witticism that no one before had ever seemed to appreciate.) “Why, thanks,” he said. And then, feeling encouraged: “I also have a T-shirt that says T-SHIRT.” Damian stopped chewing his thumbnail and gaped at him. Liam said, “Heh, heh,” in a helpful tone of voice, but still it seemed that Damian didn’t get it.
The complex Liam was moving to sat opposite a small shopping mall. It consisted of several two-story buildings, flat-faced and beige and bland, placed at angles to each other under tall, spindly pines. Liam had worried about privacy, seeing the network of paths between buildings and the flanks of wide, staring windows, but during the whole unloading process they didn’t run into a single neighbor. The carpeting of brown pine needles muffled their voices, and the wind in the trees above them made an eerily steady whispering sound. “Cool,” Damian said, presumably meaning the sound, since he had his face tipped upward as he spoke. He was under the Windsor chair again. It loomed like an oversized bonnet above his forehead.
Liam’s unit was on the ground floor. Unfortunately, it had a shared entrance—a heavy brown steel door, opening into a dank-smelling cinderblock foyer with his own door to the left and a flight of steep concrete steps directly ahead. Second-floor units cost less to rent, but Liam would have found it depressing to climb those stairs every day.
He hadn’t given much thought beforehand to the placement of his furniture. Bundy set things down any old where but Damian proved unexpectedly finicky, shoving Liam’s bed first one way and then another in search of the best view. “Like, you’ve got to see out the window first thing when you open your eyes,” he said, “or how will you know what kind of weather it is?” The bed was digging tracks across the carpet, and Liam just wanted to leave it where it stood. What did he care what kind of weather it was? When Damian started in on the desk—it had to be positioned where sunlight wouldn’t reflect off the computer screen, he said—Liam told him, “Well, since I don’t own a computer, where the desk is now will be fine. That about wraps things up, I guess.”
“Don’t own a computer!” Damian echoed.
“So let me just get you your money, and you can be on your way.”
“But how do you, like, communicate with the outside world?”
Liam was about to say that he communicated by fountain pen, but Bundy said, chuckling, “He doesn’t.” Then he clapped a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “Okay, Liam, good luck, man.”
Liam hadn’t meant to dismiss Bundy along with Damian. He had envisioned the two of them sharing the traditional moving-day beer and pizza. But of course, Bundy was providing Damian’s ride back. (It was Bundy who’d picked up the U-Haul, bless him, and now he’d be returning it.) So Liam said, “Well, thank you, Bundy. I’ll have to have you over once I’m settled in.” Then he handed Damian a hundred and twenty dollars in cash. The extra twenty was a tip, but since Damian pocketed the bills without counting them, the gesture felt like a waste. “See you around,” was all he said. Then he and Bundy left. The inner door latched gently behind them but the outer door, the brown steel one, shook the whole building when it slammed shut, setting up a shocked silence for several moments afterward and emphasizing, somehow, Liam’s sudden solitude.
&nbs
p; Well. So. Here he was.
He took a little tour. There wasn’t a lot to look at. A medium-sized living room, with his two armchairs and the rocking chair facing in random directions and filling not quite enough space. A dining area at the far end (Formica-topped table from his first marriage and three folding chairs), with a kitchen alcove just beyond. The den and the bathroom opened off the hall that led back to the bedroom. All the floors were carpeted with the same beige synthetic substance, all the walls were refrigerator white, and there were no moldings whatsoever, no baseboards or window frames or door frames, none of those gradations that had softened the angles of his old place. He found this a satisfaction. Oh, his life was growing purer, all right! He poked his head into the tiny den (daybed, desk, Windsor chair) and admired the built-in shelves. They had been a big selling point when he was apartment hunting: two tall white bookshelves on either side of the patio door. Finally, finally he’d been able to get rid of those glass-fronted walnut monstrosities he had inherited from his mother. It was true that these shelves were less spacious. He’d had to consolidate a bit, discarding the fiction and biographies and some of his older dictionaries. But he had kept his beloved philosophers, and now he looked forward to arranging them. He bent over a carton and opened the flaps. Epictetus. Arrian. The larger volumes would go on the lower shelves, he decided, even though they didn’t need to, since all the shelves were exactly, mathematically the same height. It was a matter of aesthetics, really—the visual effect. He hummed tunelessly to himself, padding back and forth between the shelves and the cartons. The sunlight streaming through the glass door brought a fine sweat to his upper lip, but he postponed rolling up his shirtsleeves because he was too absorbed in his task.
After the study came the kitchen, less interesting but still necessary, and so he moved on to the boxes of foods and utensils. This was the most basic of kitchens, with a single bank of cabinets, but that was all right; he’d never been much of a cook. In fact here it was, late afternoon, and he was only now realizing that he’d better fix himself some lunch. He made a jelly sandwich and ate it as he worked, swigging milk straight from the carton to wash it down. The sight of the six-pack of beer in the refrigerator, brought over the day before along with his perishables, gave him a pang of regret that took a moment to explain. Ah, yes: Bundy. He must remember to phone Bundy tomorrow and thank him at greater length. Invite him to supper, even. He wondered what carry-out establishments delivered within his new radius.
