Family Ties

~ Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler ~

Anne Tyler’s writing often depicts relationships, particularly familial relationships, and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is another wonderful novel in this vein. The novel begins with Pearl, who at about 30 years of age, feels she has been left on the shelf despite having had her share of suitors, and is delighted when Beck Tull, although many years her junior, comes to sweep her off her feet, marry her, and take her far away.

Pearl has her first child, Cody, then terrified by a childhood illness, she decides to have an ‘extra’ – Ezra, and yet another, Jenny. When the children are still quite young, Beck one day simply decides to leave Pearl, walk out of his family, and he never comes back. Pearl keeps up a pretense for awhile, that her husband is just away again for his work. No one ever challenges her even when it is obvious Beck is not returning. He sends a little money, and sometimes a short note to Pearl, but she brings up her family virtually on her own.

It is a somewhat dysfunctional family, and what Tyler does so well is show how each family member remembers it differently, reads it differently, and their lives are therefore shaped differently. Cody perceives rivalry with Ezra where there is none, because he assumes Ezra is their mother’s favourite. Ezra remains sweet natured and gentle, kind and caring, but loses the one love of his life to Cody, who cannot bear for Ezra to have what he himself does not, and sets out to take Ruth from his younger brother as if he was a child snatching a precious toy from another child. The tragedy is that Ruth is not compatible with Cody, but they stay together nevertheless, and have a son. Who of course is greatly attracted to his uncle Ezra, whom Cody seldom allows him to spend time with. Jenny, meanwhile, is the despair of her mother for not managing to stay married, for not caring about her looks. After 2 divorces, Jenny takes on a widower with 6 children, almost as if she prefers to be plunged into a life that is not hers, and be submerged in all its hurly burly so she has no time for herself. 

This is a novel about a family which self sabotages, which has never managed, despite all Ezra’s optimism and efforts, to sit down for a dinner at Ezra’s Homesick restaurant and finish a meal together. This is a family which creates its own heartbreaks and tragedies. Pearl is at the heart of this family of course, proud, exacting, critical, but strong, loving, caring. The writing is beautiful, spinning a world of its own, setting this snugly within its period and place (mid-1930s onwards, in Baltimore). Tyler’s writing is even more subtly inexorable than ever before, quietly luminous not in any particular one sentence or phrase, but in the way she is able to craft a narrative which spins its own world, and implies so much with such light touches. The tone is always even, undramatic, but drama happens, and in spadefuls.