Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (by Anne Tyler)

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Re-reading my collection of Anne Tyler novels nearly twenty years after first reading them, I’ve entirely forgotten the storylines as well as the characters. That’s good in that it means they feel almost like new books - but since I generally don’t check in advance what I thought of them previously, I might sometimes re-read a book which I didn’t much like first time round.

I last read ‘Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant’ back in 2004. So I had no recollection of it at all - and was slightly surprised at the opening paragraph, which informs us that Pearl Tull, a woman in her eighties, is dying. She’s bedridden and almost blind, but her mind is still active. Her son Ezra is with her, and she starts thinking about the past…

The book, set in small town America, takes the form of reminiscences over the decades. Each chapter is written from the point of view of one of Pearl’s three children in turn, and one or two other characters too, later in the book.  Cody, her eldest, is smooth-talking, generally popular, and rather a narcissist. He’s extremely competitive, and has always been jealous of his brother in ways that sometimes have quite unpleasant repercussions. He’s quite manipulative and not above cheating at times… and yet he’s oddly appealing as a character.

Ezra is the middle child, possibly her favourite. He’s intelligent, but slower-moving than his brother, more relaxed and accepting, and far too trusting. Ezra likes to keep his family close, to organise gatherings and meals. He is the owner of a restaurant and in the course of the book he tries to arrange several family meals at his restaurant, only to have them turn out badly for various reasons.

Jenny is the youngest. She’s highly focussed and academic right from the start, determined to be a doctor. Jenny barely remembers their father, who walked out when she was a child - and, bizarrely, Pearl kept pretending, for years, that he had just left on a long business trip. 

So the book gradually unfolds, showing us snapshots in the lives of each of these three, with different perspectives as we see events through different eyes. Pearl, it’s clear, has been extremely stressed over the years and in many ways was an unpleasant, almost abusive mother - and yet her adult children have turned out reasonably well, and stay in touch with each other, albeit loosely. 

The writing is good, as is the characterisation, but the pace is a bit slow for my tastes, and when I picked up the book some evenings I had to re-read a couple of pages to remind myself who was speaking and what was going on.  Anne Tyler has a gift for observation, and I love some of her phraseology; yet this book didn’t really grab me. It’s a circular kind of book, starting with Pearl on her deathbed, seeing her children growing up to the present date, right up to - and after - the point where she dies. 

It’s a character-based book, without a great deal of plot, and I wouldn’t particularly recommend it as an introduction to this author’s work. But it’s a pleasant enough story, and I might even read it again in another couple of decades.

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