About book Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant (1996)
This is my first time to read 3 books by an author in succession: one, two, three... Just like the saying when it rains, it pours, I am having an Anne Tyler Book Festival. After reading her The Accidental Tourist I went to the bookstore and bought Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and read right away. Then last Friday, when I was winding down with the second book, I bought Breathing Lessons and I am now reading it. The whole experience is like finding a gold mine. Here is Anne Tyler who I never thought to be an author I would enjoy reading. A couple of years back, with only 200+ read books, I was having a hard time naming my favorite contemporary female authors. Jodi Piccoult was a turn off. Jennifer Egan was a disappointment. Elizabeth Gilbert was a dud. Of course, I loved Virginia Woolf, Emilie Bronte, Muriel Sparks, Carlson McCullers, Flannery O’Brien, and Iris Murdoch but they are all dead. Let’s not talk about Emma Donaghue. The two Alices - McDemott and Munro - won my heart but not enough motivation for me to look, buy and read their other books right away.Anne Tyler is different. She writes with so much clarity and her characters are so interesting you could almost see, feel, smell and taste them. Her settings are all in heartland USA (Baltimore, mostly) and so, reading her books feels like you are watching afternoon drama series of American families, regardless of how dysfunctional or typical they are.I was blown over by the eccentric characters in her The Accidental Tourist but I admired how she narrated the flight of the Tull family in this book, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. The book has 3 themes and each of them is emphasized at different parts of the book:1. The effects of a father’s abandonment of his family. Beck Tull, because of some flimsy personal reasons, abandons his family that includes his three kids, Cody, Jenny and Ezra. Underneath their life stories is the pain that they have to live through because their father just, without telling them so, stepped out of their lives at the time they needed him to be there.2. The difficulty of the remaining parent to try to make ends meet for the family. With Beck Tull gone, Pearl Tull, the mother has to support her 3 kids. This book shows that a mother, however loving she wants to be, can be neurotic and lose her temper because of the tall responsibility of raising her kids single-handedly. Mothers are human beings and they can do wrong. However, it is up to us to understand their shortcomings. Sometimes, however, some of us may not be as understanding as our siblings.3. The passing of time, No matter how much painful our childhood was, we are now adults and we have our own lives to live: our own wife, children and grandchildren. We tend to do to them what our parents showed us. At the end of our life’s journey, however, it all boils down to the passing of time and this theme was brilliantly encapsulated in this paragraph (let me give you a sample of Tyler’s wonderful prose):”Everything,” his father said, “comes down to time in the end- to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it all based on minutes going by? Isn’t happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again? Even big things – even mourning a death: aren’t you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos – ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? Long-ago people smiling, a child who would be an old lady now, a cat that died, a flowering plant that’s long since withered away and the pot itself broken or misplaced… Isn’t it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.”I am now reading her Pulitzer (1989)-award winning book Breathing Lessons and one thing that is very apparent is Tyler’s ability to make each of her book distinct and different from each other. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant has different POVs and the story is centered on a single family. The Accidental Tourist has only one POV, that of Macom Leary’s. Breathing Lessons opens with a couple who has two kids and at least judging from its opening, has a different taste compared to the first two books.Anne Tyler (born 1941) has so far written 17 novels. I blame her for adding 14 more to my hunting-for-this folder. If only I could read two books at the same time, one book per eye/hand, I would read all her other 14 books straight without letup.
"While Pearl Tull was dying, a funny thought occured to her."I was just going to read this first sentence and then put the book down, but how do you stop reading with a first sentence like that? First, I wondered what the thought was, and secondly, it occured to me that I wouldn't expect funny, random things to come to mind while dying. Wouldn't it trivialize the whole all-encompassing fact that your life is ending?It captured my interest, and really, the whole book was the same - highlighting the strangness of beginnings and endings in our erratic, jumbled, rambling lives. I guess what is funny and tragic about the first sentence is that it is so true - big things happen to us while we are in mid-thought. (Or as John Lenin put it, life is what happens when you are busy making other plans). Some of the big things I will take away from this book are best revealed in these quotes:“It was remarkable, Pearl thought, how people displayed their characters in every little thing they undertook.” “She’d been preoccupied with death for several years now; but one aspect had never before crossed her mind: dying, you don’t get to see how it all turns out. Questions you have asked will go unanswered forever. Will this one of my children settle down? Will that one learn to be happier? Will I ever discover what was meant by such-and-such? All these years, it emerged, she’d been expecting to run into Beck again. How odd; she hadn’t realized. She had also supposed that there would be some sort of turning point, a flash of light in which she’d suddenly find out the secret; one day she’d wake up wiser and more contented and accepting. But it hadn’t happened. Now it never would. She’d supposed that on her deathbed…deathbed! Why, that was this everyday, ordinary Posturepedic, not the ornate brass affair that she had always envisioned. She had supposed that on her deathbed, she would have something final to tell her children when they gathered round. But nothing was final. She didn’t have anything to tell them. She felt a kind of shyness; she felt inadequate.”
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There used to be a restaurant in Baltimore called Hausner's and I always imagined it might be the model for the Homesick. I don't think it was, though.I just read this book again, and I find it remarkable that I remembered almost none of it. It's much sadder than I remembered. And, most surprising, I didn't remember the incidents of child abuse. Of all the things to forget! Anne Tyler is noted for her "angel's eye view" of her characters, loving and forgiving even the meanest among them. And she certainly does that here. I wonder how much abuse she saw in her own life and whether any of the interviewers ever asked her about it.
—Gerald
If you have not ever read this book, stop reading this review right now, go pick it up, and don't do anything else until you're done. If you're still reading this then you're either disobedient or you know how truly fabulous this novel is. Anne Tyler is an absolutely genius writer. She takes a series of events that are seemingly nothing--seriously, nothing of "consequence" really happens in this book--but you're captivated from the first chapter.As I was reading I found myself feeling sympathy for which ever perspective was being used--she writes from Pearl, Cody, Ezra, and Jenny at different points throughout the book. When you're reading Cody you feel so badly for Cody, and (paradoxically) when you read Ezra your heart breaks for him. And it seems hard to imagine, having read any of the children's chapters, but you actually feel that Pearl (and her husband) as well are characters were rich and deep back-stories that are so complex.At the end of the book I found myself deeply saddened, to the point of near tears (if I hadn't been at dinner with my family in Fazoli's I'd probably have let the tears spill). I just felt that these characters were all so tragic, their lives so sad, and then I realized what Tyler's teaching--everyone is tragic. No one has the perfect life. Family is very nearly all anybody has, and it makes you re-think what you think of your family and closest friends.This book was easily, so easily, an A+ in my book. If I weren't a stickler for the grading system, I'd have given it an A++. It's really that good.
—Heather
Tyler's humor, her sense of place, her eccentric characters, her use of language, and her lyrical descriptions are magnificent. Anne Tyler says that Eudora Welty has been the most influential on her writing and the admiration is mutual, as shown by Welty's comment about this novel: "If I could have written the last sentence in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant I'd have been happy for the rest of my life" (Welty in Salwak, p. 11)Tolstoy famously wrote that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That is certainly true of the Tull family that we meet in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. "Everything,' his father said, 'comes down to time in the end--to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn't it all based on minutes going by? Isn't sadness wishing time back again? Even big things--even mourning a death: aren't you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos--ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? ... Isn't it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once."
—Rose
