Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: A Novel

This is the first purchase I’ve made on this website in a couple years and I am reminded of why I stopped buying from here. I ordered a book that was in very good condition but received one with a large portion of the back cover ripped off, a rip in the front cover, and a frayed binding.

I am an AP (Advanced Placement) English student, and I was required to read this book as one of the summer selections previous to my senior year. I picked it up, expected it to be in the same class of drudgery as the other eight novels I'd already plowed through. Luckily, though, I was pleasantly surprised by Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Halfway through the first chapter, I was already hooked on the misadventures of the Tull family - they reminded me of *my* family! The Tulls are so dysfunctional that everyone can identify with them. The plot was touching, and in places evoked strong emotions, as good writing always will. The book is funny, heartwarming, and hits very close to home. I'm lending my copy to everyone I know - AP student or not. :)

It is difficult to find anything to say about this book that has not already been said before, here and elsewhere, many times over. I had been saving this book for a long time and now I know what everyone was raving about. Tyler's books often have a theme of abandonment --- caused by death, disappearance, desertion, or just general malaise. No matter what the cause, the characters must go on, often propelled by the grief caused by this abandonment. The author always finds a way for her characters to get through and keep on going. In this book, the strange disappearance of the father, Beck Tull, is never mentioned by his wife and children..... it is as if he never existed. The family goes on, powered by Pearl's sometimes abusive strength and her unspoken grief at being abandoned. Pearl is so enmeshed in her own problems, so inflexible, negative, and narrow-minded that the family never really becomes a cohesive unit. Jenny says that they all grew up and "the three of us turned out fine", but did they really? I think, as Cody says, that they all were "in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place". Ezra, on the other hand, despite his seemingly low self-esteem, is the most optimistic character in the book. He is constantly trying to make the Tulls into a family, as demonstrated by his oft-failed attempts to have a completed family dinner. Even though someone always storms out before the dinner is finished, Ezra keeps on trying, over and over again.Ezra is obsessed with food because he has a strong need to nurture, and food is his choice of how to do this. Unlike Cody and Jenny, he wants to believe that his family is normal and can have an amicable time together. Pearl is just the opposite of Ezra - her meals, if you can call them that, are tasteless, dull, and rare. She is abusive and mean, unlike Ezra, who has a sweet nature and seems determined not to be like his parents. Over and over again, Tyler has written novels about ordinary folks.....they are classless and unable to be pigeonholed. The families are "different" (just as Tyler's was) which sometimes translates into "dysfunctional". Her writing is as plain and unadorned as the people who populate her books (perhaps a throwback to her Quaker upbringing). Thanks, Anne Tyler, for many hours of wonderful reading.

First I have to admit my bias ... I have read every Anne Tyler and will read them all again. That said, this is easily my favorite. Anne Tyler's gift is in presenting the reader with the extraordinary lives of ordinary people and polishing them into sparkling clarity. This is not a book for the plot-driven reader (nor are any of Tyler's). The plot seems to almost swirl around the sometimes bewildered characters, bringing their true selves into sharp, unsympathetic focus. The soul of this novel is in joining the Tull family members on their respective journeys ... the mother, Pearl, into her fears and regrets and resolutions at death (didn't blow a plot point, that's there on the first page), and each of the children into discovering how to soothe their own wounds and somehow become a family. This book is about pain, love, feeling like a stranger in your own family, forgiveness, loss, and allowing yourself and the people around you to be imperfect. Please read it!

When I finished this book I had a sort of let down feeling. Is that all there is? But her prose is so beautiful, I went back to read the final paragraph aloud to my friend at breakfast the next morning. I discovered her mastery at saying profound things while telling a seemingly ordinary story. How many of us carry the perceptions of our childhood, of things that happen when we are perhaps 6 or 8 years old, for the rest of our lives and allow them to mold and shape the entire remainder of our lives? Perceptions that may or may not have been true, or perhaps were true then and are no longer. This book, as have her others, moved me and taught me great lessons. Thanks, Anne.