Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. New York: Berkley Books, 1983.
I don’t remember when I first read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. I know that there was a time when I devoured anything Anne Tyler wrote. I’m sure this was first read during that phase. I’ve always pictured this as a movie. It should be a movie.
There is no doubt Tyler wanted Dinner to be a character novel. The plot moves slow enough so that more emphasis is placed on the people within the constraints of the narrow storyline. The characters swell and grow beyond the plot, making them the focal point. For example, Cody does enough rotten things that it should be impossible for the reader to like him and maybe even go so far as to hate him and yet, one finds ways to feel sorry for him because he is not his mother’s favorite child. He’s not even her second favorite. I find it interesting that no matter how rotten Tyler made Cody out to be I couldn’t help but pity him. His “lashing out” made me want to protect him and love him. He even had his quiet moments of kindness, “Cody took a pinch of Jenny’s coat sleeve so as not to lose her” (p 61). In fact, all of the characters are this way. Pearl Tull is an abusive, angry mother but you have to pity her because her husband walked out on her for apparently no reason. She is left to raise three small children completely on her own. Cody, the oldest, is only eight when his father leaves. Jenny is the middle child and Ezra is the youngest. All three children grow to be self-absorbed adults with difficult-to-love personalities. And yet, yet you want them to be okay.
Favorite revelations: “It was if, by mutual agreement, they had split the city between them” (p 80), “He’d had a long day – standing outside other people’s lives mostly – and he needed the exercise” (p 145), and “Couldn’t you classify a person…purely by examining his attitude towards food?” (p 162).
BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in three different chapters. First in “Families in Trouble” (p 82). Also, from the chapters called “Mothers and Sons” (p 161) and “100 Good Reads, Decade by Decade: 1980” (p 179). I’m reading Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant to celebrate food.
~*LunaSea*~ 