Book Reviews
Perhaps Tyler intends Liam’s desire for what he calls “someone else to experience your life for you” to justify the lengths to which she forces this slow-moving, passive man in his attempt to finagle a transaction with a stranger glimpsed at a doctor’s office. But the madcap nature of the quest feels out of character and doesn’t succeed as comedy.... What this novel needs is a heroine.... If Bootsie doesn’t arrive in time to save Noah’s Compass, she...shows us what we’ve been missing: a female voice that can’t be ignored or dismissed.
Katherine Harris - New York Times Book Review
A small story that provides an interesting variation on those dismal tales of aging by [Philip] Roth & Co…"Just trying to stay afloat"—neither sinking into Roth's existential despair nor ascending into Oprah's blinding self-delight—that's the difficult, totally unhip theme that Tyler takes clear to the end of this understated novel. In fact, Noah's Compass is likely to dissatisfy many of the author's fans, who have come to count on her for more fully resolved tragedies or more satisfying personal insights. Instead, with Liam, she has articulated the melancholy stasis of many older people's lives.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Noah’s Compass is immensely readable. It displays many of Tyler’s finest qualities: her sharp observation of humanity, her wry comedy; the luminous accuracy of her descriptions.... Hers is a fine-grained art, whose comedy could easily coarsen into the self-consciously quirky. If it does not, this is because her surprises are rooted in character: it is human nature that she evidently finds infinitely fascinating and surprising, with its constantly unforeseeable capacity for change.... [A] novel by Anne Tyler is cause for celebration.
Caroline Moore - The Sunday Telegraph
Tyler reveals, with unobtrusive mastery, the disconcerting patchwork of comedy and pathos that marks all our lives.
Wall Street Journal
Tyler’s artistry and intelligence are both firmly in evidence in her newest novel – as are the compassion and deep well of melancholy that run through her best work. The action in Noah’s Compass is as muted as its hero, but its drab, meandering exterior hides something profound. Tyler has crafted a novel in which very little changes, and yet a man is completely transfigured.
Yvonne Zipp - Christian Science Monitor
Everyone loves Anne Tyler...and her 18th novel will doubtless supply another reason.
San Francisco Chronicle
Tyler's gift is to make the reader empathize with this flawed but decent man, and to marvel at how this determinedly low-key, plainspoken novelist achieves miracles of insight and understanding.
Publishers Weekly
Unlike similar Updike and Roth characters, who worry more about their inability to perform sexual athletics any longer, Tyler's character struggles with the visceral loss of identity brought on by forced retirement and the indignities of memory loss. Verdict: Another winning effort by Tyler.
Library Journal
[D]eceptively rich and enigmatically titled.... Beneath the comedy on the surface of any Tyler novel lies an undercurrent of existential melancholy.... By the end of the novel, the particulars of Liam's life really haven't changed that much, but he is utterly transformed. And so will be the reader.
Kirkus Reviews