Anne Tyler's 'Noah's Compass': A retired teacher looks at the rest of his life

'Noah's Compass'

by Anne Tyler

Random House, 277 pp., $25.95

Late in Anne Tyler's 18th novel, "Noah's Compass," a character returns home and marvels at how the lingering smell of yesterday's cocoa "made the apartment seem like someone else's — someone more domestic, and cozier."

Reading a Tyler novel has much the same effect: Her beautifully crafted tales of families in flux leave the reader calmer and happier, feeling a little better about the world.

Tyler takes us into the heads of nice, well-meaning people working out problems common to us all: unhappy marriages ("The Amateur Marriage"), distant children ("Breathing Lessons," "Ladder of Years"), squabbling family members ("Back When We Were Grownups"), the losses that time brings (virtually all of her books). They, and we, always feel a little better by the end, by which time Tyler has effortlessly brought her characters exactly where we want them to be.

Such is the journey for Liam Pennywell, the 61-year-old former schoolteacher at the center of "Noah's Compass." Twice married but now alone (his first wife died, his second marriage ended in divorce), he has strained relationships with the various women in his life, all of whom regularly barge into his home without knocking and offer suggestions for self-improvement: his sister Julia (who, in delicious Tyler prose, "could hold a grudge forever ... [She] collected and polished resentments as if it were some sort of hobby"); his ex-wife Barbara; his grown daughters Xanthe and Louise; his teenage daughter Kitty.

Liam's early retirement begins inauspiciously: On the first night he sleeps in a new, efficiently sparse apartment, he's hit on the head by a burglar and wakes up in the hospital, having lost his memory of a few days. As he struggles to regain his memory and control over his anchorless life, he meets a fresh-faced young woman named Eunice, whose innocent simplicity seems to offer him a chance for an uncomplicated, slow-moving relationship, something his life hasn't previously held. But Eunice is more complex than she initially seems, and Liam eventually realizes that he's had a certain amount of amnesia all along.

Though it's a Tyler trademark to surround a quiet hero/heroine with a swirling mass of family — you sometimes want to swat them away like flies — Liam is at times almost too passive; he's not as engaging as some of the author's previous characters. (My favorites: the haunted, determinedly eccentric Macon Leary of "The Accidental Tourist"; the young-beyond-her-years Delia of "Ladder of Years"; the scattered, fiercely loving Maggie of "Breathing Lessons.")

Until one unexpectedly decisive move late in the novel, Liam seems frustratingly low-key, though he's certainly realistic — you can see why all these women want to improve him.

Nonetheless, "Noah's Compass" is a great pleasure for the grace of Tyler's writing. A peripheral character is perfectly painted with his too-long "orphanish" hair and a "pale, thin mustache ... that you couldn't help picturing how the individual wisps would grow unpleasantly moist whenever he ate." And Liam's 4-year-old grandson Jonah makes him a gift at the end that's perfect, in true Tyler fashion — something homey and handmade, to help mark where he's going, and where he's been.

Moira Macdonald is the movie critic for The Seattle Times.