Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler.✔✔✓

A number of years ago, I read several books by Anne Tyler - Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons, Ladder of Years, and - my favorite - Saint Maybe, with its Church of the Second Chance! Tyler is a keen observer of human nature - the humor, the lost opportunities, the foibles and follies of being human - yet she portrays a message that resonates so clearly.

Noah's Compass tells the story of Liam Pennywell, a 60-year-old teacher facing forced retirement, and trying to come to terms with the rest of his life when - on the first night in his new, smaller apartment- an intruder hits him on the head and he wakes up in hospital without any recollection of what happened to him.

His family - all of whom he rarely sees - come in to visit him and he meets a younger woman whose job is "a rememberer" for an elderly man. He finds himself becoming involved with Eunice, not entirely willingly, and his youngest daughter, Kitty, comes to spend the summer with him. Liam would dearly love to know what happened when he was injured, but instead, these women, plus his ex-wife and other children, just by their very presence helps him remember things from his past which are far more meaningful to him, and enable him to face this end of his life.

Liam feels he has always been an observer in life, never a full participant. Liam believes his life is “drying up and hardening, like one of those mouse carcasses you find beneath a radiator.” He’s “just trying to make it through to bedtime every night.” “I am not especially unhappy,” he imagines writing on a postcard to the public, “but I don’t see any particular reason to go on living.” Late in the novel he realizes that his "true self" left him after his first wife committed suicide and left him with a baby to raise, and never came back. Hence, the significance of the novel's title: His grandson, Jonah, is reading about Noah, and Liam explains to him how Noah didn't need a compass, because he wasn't going anywhere specific. " There was nowhere to go. He was just trying to stay afloat. He was just bobbing up and down, so he didn't need a compass, or a rudder, or a sextant..."

And that is how Liam is living his life. I would have wished for a better ending to the relationship with Eunice, but at least he restores a relationship with his daughters. The best parts of Tyler's writing are the humorous observations, worth many chuckles, and occasionally a good laugh ( like when the kindergarten boys rub their fingerpaints up and down the backs of the girls dresses).

And here's a quote I really connected with: " Epicetus says that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one by which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don't take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he's your brother, That's how it can be borne".