Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler

 

I first read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1987, and I've since considered it to be one of my two favorite Anne Tyler novels. This afternoon, some thirty-seven years later, I finished reading the novel for the second time - and the tie is broken. I'm disappointed to say that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant did not quite live up to my memories of it. I know...I know. I've changed. Or maybe I'm not in the right mood for a novel like this one right now. Perhaps I've seen too many similar stories told by now, or maybe even seen the same story told better. Whatever the case, this re-read reminds me that you don't always get what you wish for when your pick up an old favorite for the first time in decades.

Don't get me wrong. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is an excellent novel. It's just that it's an Anne Tyler novel, and I hold Tyler and other writers I consider among the best I've ever read to a much higher standard than the standard I use to judge lesser writers by (and I know that's not fair).

As are all Anne Tyler novels, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is set in Baltimore. Pearl Tull is dying, and for the first time in a long, long while she is not angry at the world. She's tired of being angry at the husband who abandoned her and his three children thirty-five years earlier, and now that her children are all relatively successful adults, she doesn't have the energy to be angry at them either. Her children, though, are still struggling with the anger Pearl passed down to them. 

Cody, oldest of the three, still resents his mother for choosing his younger brother Ezra as her favorite, and he still sees Ezra more as a rival to be competed against than as a brother. Ezra, on the other hand, is so passive and easygoing, that Cody ends up largely fighting himself, not Ezra. And because this is not a touchy-feely kind of family, Jenny directs her empathy elsewhere and becomes a successful pediatrician. None of the three think much about their father anymore, and all of them have learned to get along plenty well without ever having known the man.

But Ezra, ever the idealist, won't give up on his family. He owns an unusual restaurant, a place purposely built to remind patrons of the kind of home-cooked meals they grew up on, even to Ezra occasionally choosing what meal his customers are going to have on a given night. For every big family event, Ezra invites his mother, his siblings, and their children for a special meal at the restaurant - but the Tulls have never successfully completed even one dinner. One or another of them (usually Pearl or Cody) always stalks off in a huff somewhere around the midway point of the meal - if not even before the first bites are taken. Ezra, however, is not a quitter, and he has one last chance to make it happen. 

A family dinner has been planned for right after Pearl's funeral - with one surprise guest.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a generational saga about a family slow to learn from its past. It is a warning about what can happen when families are incapable of change, and how the sins of one generation can make life miserable for the next. Now the question is whether or not this latest Tull family dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is also going to be the last one - or if they finally get it right.

Dust jacket photo, disclaimer and all