Man put off course
By Kathryn Harrison |
January 3, 2010, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
NOAH, Liam Pennywell explains to his grandson, "didn't need a compass, or a rudder, or a sextant." He didn't need sails on his ark, either, because there was no place to go in a drowned world.
"Noah's Compass" is Anne Tyler's 18th novel, and we've met Liam before. He's cut from the same cloth as Macon Leary, the immovable author of the travel guides for which "The Accidental Tourist" is titled; as Jeremy Pauling, the reclusive artist whose life is narrated by the cast of women in "Celestial Navigation;" as Barnaby Gaitlin, of "A Patchwork Planet," employed by "Rent-a-Back" to do other people's errands.
Lonely and defeated, self-effacing to a fault, Tyler's male protagonists experience life as if it were an unexpected wave breaking over their heads, leaving them in sodden, lingering bewilderment.
A device as primitive as a compass couldn't deliver them to a happy ending. Too confused, and too impotent, to align its points with reality, they need the psychogenic equivalent of a GPS device to tell them what road to take out of inertia.
At 61, Liam has lost his job "teaching fifth grade in a second-rate private boys' school," an embarrassment he accepts with the informed stoicism of someone who completed all but his dissertation for a doctorate in philosophy.
Now he can settle into retirement in a smaller, cheaper apartment on the outskirts of Baltimore, the city Tyler owns as a novelist, so faithfully does she return to its setting.
But before Liam has spent even one night in what he expects will be his "final dwelling place," a would-be burglar comes through the back door Liam failed to lock.
The next thing Liam knows, he's in a hospital bed, his head bandaged, with no idea of how he came to be there. The burglar may not have made off with any of Liam's material possessions, but he hit him hard enough to obliterate a few hours' worth of his memory, and it is this loss -- rather than that of a teaching position he didn't much like -- that serves as a catalyst for all that follows.
Neither his ex-wife nor his three daughters, who consider Liam so obtuse they call him Mr Magoo, understand his growing fixation on retrieving what he can't remember, especially as it was, presumably, traumatic. As it turns out, Liam's disengagement is a symptom of depression. And while novels are populated by the luckless and lovelorn, depressed people are not very funny, even when they do funny things.
"Noah's Compass" is Anne Tyler's 18th novel, and we've met Liam before. He's cut from the same cloth as Macon Leary, the immovable author of the travel guides for which "The Accidental Tourist" is titled; as Jeremy Pauling, the reclusive artist whose life is narrated by the cast of women in "Celestial Navigation;" as Barnaby Gaitlin, of "A Patchwork Planet," employed by "Rent-a-Back" to do other people's errands.
Lonely and defeated, self-effacing to a fault, Tyler's male protagonists experience life as if it were an unexpected wave breaking over their heads, leaving them in sodden, lingering bewilderment.
A device as primitive as a compass couldn't deliver them to a happy ending. Too confused, and too impotent, to align its points with reality, they need the psychogenic equivalent of a GPS device to tell them what road to take out of inertia.
At 61, Liam has lost his job "teaching fifth grade in a second-rate private boys' school," an embarrassment he accepts with the informed stoicism of someone who completed all but his dissertation for a doctorate in philosophy.
Now he can settle into retirement in a smaller, cheaper apartment on the outskirts of Baltimore, the city Tyler owns as a novelist, so faithfully does she return to its setting.
But before Liam has spent even one night in what he expects will be his "final dwelling place," a would-be burglar comes through the back door Liam failed to lock.
The next thing Liam knows, he's in a hospital bed, his head bandaged, with no idea of how he came to be there. The burglar may not have made off with any of Liam's material possessions, but he hit him hard enough to obliterate a few hours' worth of his memory, and it is this loss -- rather than that of a teaching position he didn't much like -- that serves as a catalyst for all that follows.
Neither his ex-wife nor his three daughters, who consider Liam so obtuse they call him Mr Magoo, understand his growing fixation on retrieving what he can't remember, especially as it was, presumably, traumatic. As it turns out, Liam's disengagement is a symptom of depression. And while novels are populated by the luckless and lovelorn, depressed people are not very funny, even when they do funny things.
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