Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I remember emerging from a New York City art museum, some years ago, after spending an hour looking at the artwork in a Richard Estes exhibition. Estes is a photo-realist painter of meticulously detailed urban scenes. As soon as I hit the sidewalk I noticed that storefronts, taxis, buses, office towers, the dome of the sky -- all looked different. I was seeing the world with new eyes, with more sharply focused vision -- an aftereffect of immersion in Estes' art. Most striking was a heightened awareness of the unique light that fills the streets of Manhattan. Everything was vivid. A similar transformation occurs whenever I finish a new novel by Anne Tyler and return to the real world. Time spent with Tyler engenders new perceptions of the everyday physical environment. It also inspires a more generous understanding of human interactions, personal relationships, family dynamics. "Noah's Compass" is among Tyler's least ambitious novels. Still, the book's pleasures are abundant, and the author is in full command of her craft. Some critics disparage Tyler as a play-it-safe miniaturist. They say she avoids grappling with the Big Themes of history and politics, existence and death. She's stuck in the quotidian. Yet even in this modest story, Tyler is not afraid to confront harrowing truths. The novel's protagonist, Liam Pennywell, observes: "We live such tangled, fraught lives . . . but in the end we die like all the other animals and we're buried in the ground and after a few more years we might as well not have existed." Could these words be a bone Tyler is throwing to ravenous critics? Probably not, as Tyler likely doesn't pay much attention to what others would prefer her to write about. Even her most severe critics have to concede, I think, that she shares with the best Big Theme novelists a rare power to convey to the reader what it feels like to be alive. This talent is on display once again in "Noah's Compass". One of the pleasures of the book is that its hold on the reader gains strength page after page. It begins in familiar Tyler territory, introducing a main character divorced from a full life, surviving on half measures. In one deftly sketched scene after another, Liam, passive and possibly depressive, is beset by the women in his life. They intrude upon his present as well as his memory. And, in a seemingly uneventful life, some events leave wounds. Complications blend the farcical and tragic. Inveterate Tyler readers, familiar with the usual arc of her plots, know from the outset that Liam will find himself in a different state by the close of the tale. He will grow a bit, as will the reader. The book's final chapter takes place in a charmed setting: a preschool class of three-year-olds. It is a perfect stage upon which to close out the narrative with a modest summing up. A decade ago, on the final page of "A Patchwork Planet," Tyler led its young protagonist, Barnaby Gaitlin, to a life-changing decision -- the choice of a mate. Barnaby says yes to his intended by quoting a line from Shakespeare's Sonnet 29: "Haply I think on thee." In contrast, the end of "Noah's Compass" is more equivocal, more elegiac. Liam, a retired teacher summoned back to life, demonstrates simply (in the manner of old Prospero) that a new chapter is ready to begin, even while this tale -- this particular entertainment -- has reached its close. Tyler's novels insist there are no solutions to the mysteries of why people are the way they are. Life offers no answers. Yet there are, in the author's universe, lessons to be absorbed, more things to learn, as when Liam looks upon the children he cares for as a volunteer teaching assistant: "It came as news to [Liam] that small children maintained such a firm social structure. They played consistent roles in their dealings with each other; they held fierce notions of justice; they formed alliances and ad hoc committees and little vigilante groups. Lunches were parodies of grownups' dinner parties, just with different conversational topics. Danny held forth at length on spaghetti's resemblance to earthworms, and some of the little girls said, "Eww!" and pushed their plates away, but then Hannah -- first clearing her throat importantly -- delivered a discourse on a chocolate-covered ant she'd once eaten, while shy little Jake watched everybody admiringly from the sidelines." What always happens when reading an Anne Tyler novel happened, this time, when I was halfway through "Noah's Compass." Tyler aficionados know what I'm talking about. You come upon a magical passage; read a perfectly-phrased description of a person or place or encounter; listen to a precisely-pitched stretch of dialog; savor a descriptive paragraph that expresses a sentiment often thought "but ne'er so well expressed" -- and you think to yourself, How the hell did she do that? Let me read that again. Let me grab a pencil so I can mark these spots. But then you find yourself marking up every page. Tyler has done it again. I love the Baltimore dialect ("let me skootch this footstool around"), the surprises offered up from Tyler's rich bag of similes ("the marble treads were worn down in the middle like old soap bars"), and the Updike-like attention to detail. Rhymes and echoes abound, usually in service to Tyler's ever-wise examination of human psychology. Virtually everything has metaphorical significance. Relationships evolve through fits and starts. On his first encounter with a new acquaintance named Eunice, Liam reflects on her behavior: "Either she was admirably at ease anywhere or she suffered from a total lack of discrimination." The tension of yes and no, true and false, is non-stop. This is life. When complications reach their heaviest, Liam asks, "How had things reached such a state? But it wasn't his fault. He honestly didn't think he should be shouldering the blame for this." This brings to mind the opening sentence of a notable Big Theme novel from the last century: "Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested." In Tyler's hands, the serious is leavened with the comical. Liam, arrested in his tracks, comes across as a bit of a schlemiel. Although she loves her characters and watches over them tenderly from the sidelines (like shy little Jake), Tyler lets no one off lightly. None of us escapes unscathed.