Noah's Compass - Anne Tyler

I love Anne Tyler’s novels. I’ve read them all and some of them, such as ‘Saint Maybe’ three or four times. I’ve even hunted out things like ‘The Good Housekeeping Book of Short Stories’ because it had a couple of rare pieces by her.

I love the fact that not a great deal happens and when it does, it happens rather wistfully, and often inbetween chapters. Months, sometimes years pass between chapters and we pick up with the characters when they’re being older and a little bit (maybe not) wiser. And when we see them they’re doing things like cutting the grass or having a terse, difficult family visit or an argument in a supermarket aisle.

She often has these diffident, quiet men at the centres of her books. Often they’re men who’ve had to grow up early for various reasons, and have had responsibility thrown upon them. They have other, wilder siblings, who dither in and out of the action. There are often middle-aged women, mothers and wives, who get up one day and walk away from their lives. And there is usually a ditzy, slightly unkempt younger woman who turns out to be the most capable one of all.

As the years have gone on (she started publishing in the mid-sixties) Tyler’s characters have grown older with her. Looking back to the books of the 60s and 70s, some of those people were having rackety lifestyles: they were making life up as they went along. Nowadays she’s less interested in the hapless young and is mostly writing about more sedentary older people. Or the younger people from back then, thirty, forty years on. Hence Liam, the 61 year old would-be philosopher in the new novel, ‘Noah’s Compass.’

Like other men in Tyler’s books – especially Macon in ‘The Accidental Tourist’ – he’s a man who has drifted away from his family, his home, his ties-to-life. Even his memories are eluding him. He has a chance of coming back to life, of returning to the thick of it, when he hooks up with the younger, eccentric ‘professional rememberer’ Eunice. He overcomes his embarrassment at her inexpert attempts at being herself – and falls for her.

Of course, I love being in Tyler’s world. I always do. She writes scenes of toe-curling, gut-churning domestic embarrassment and unsentimental warmth that I envy and adore for their simplicity and their truthfulness. But… this one book leaves me a little bit hollow, I think. I feel like we have arrived at the end of the story. This is the epilogue to the great long family romance of these characters.

We get a parade of tricky daughters and curious ex-wives and so on… but only in passing. There’s a lovely flashback to the doomed first wife, back in the 70s… this pale creature who let it all go to hell. But we only see glimpses of these dramatic highpoints. Tyler’s books use to let us dwell in the past a bit more. She used to take us there. Plonk us right in the middle of it. Now we’re just picking up the echoes.

At the end of the book Liam has a memory suddenly come back to him. One that makes him laugh. An absurd Christmas morning scene, back from when his wife donated their tree and all its ornaments to a neighbour. All through the book he’s been wanting his memory back. He’s been adrift (hmmm… and the title came over a bit pushed too, I think). So he gets a memory that he isn’t expecting – and it’s a happy one, and a lovely note to end on.

I guess it’s all about not raking up the shitty memories and being glad the scars heal up… which is laudable. She’s telling him – and us – it’s better to move on. But I liked it better when she was sending us back to the start and bringing the past to turbulent life all around us.