Frustrated with compression!

What you do rather depends on what the original is like. Normalizing to -1dB is fine - that's near enough the reference level for all of the compressors and limiters in Audition, but this will normalize to the peaks - so it's hardly surprising that the main body of the speech remains relatively low in level. If it's a completely natural recording, it will have a lot of those short spiky peaks, and to get the overall level up, you should use a limiter on them, not compression. The reason your settings for compression don't work are that you have the ratio control pretty much at zero - which is going to minimise any effect at all you get. For speech you'd be better off using the Hard Limiter and experimenting with that. Alternatively try the Speech Volume Leveler - both of these are designed to work with speech.

When you've normalized the audio, without zooming in, have a look at the waveform and see where the top of the 'body' of it lies - that's about where you need to set the threshold value (often at around -6 to -10dB). Above that, you need the ratio set to a high number, so that the level is limited at about that point. Then you have to re-normalize, and everything will jump up in level. Amazingly enough, you won't miss those peaks in the slightest...