The night before Mrs. Scarlatti is brought home from hospital, Ezra Tull takes a sledgehammer to her restaurant. He knocks through the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, and strips out the dark formal trimmings. He has something new in mind: a place where diners can watch the cooking, where the menu is chalked up fresh each day, where people come for the food they have been missing. Her face, when she is carried past the wreckage the next morning, is one of the saddest images in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler. The novel never stops asking whether you can feed people what they long for without breaking something they loved.
Why Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Is About Food
Food is the only language the Tull family shares, and they all speak it badly. Cody, the eldest, works it out while courting the woman his brother means to marry. Some people, he decides, are born feeders and some are not. His mother Pearl serves meals as a chore to be got through. His sister Jenny is forever dieting. He himself barely notices what is on his plate. Ezra, and the red-haired country cook Ruth, belong to the other tribe, the ones who measure love in what they set before you. The scene in which Ruth puts a bowl of her chicken-feet soup in front of Cody and watches him finish every drop is both a seduction and a dare.
That divide runs through every chapter of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler. Ezra keeps cooking because cooking is how he reaches people. His mother keeps refusing to be reached, and so do his siblings, in their own ways. Most of the comedy, and nearly all of the heartbreak, lives in that gap.
Thanksgiving Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The holiday scene readers remember comes in the early 1960s, when the restaurant has been discovered by long-haired young people who crowd in every night for the plain wood and honest food. Jenny is away with her in-laws, so it is Pearl, Ezra, Cody and his new wife at the family table. Ezra offers to show Ruth the kitchen where she used to cook. Cody watches them through the open doorway with his napkin half unfolded, then marches in and walks her straight out of the restaurant. Pearl and Ezra eat their turkey alone on an acre of white linen.
Tyler does not milk it. The scene passes in a page or two of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, and its sadness is in the small things: Pearl asking why it always turns out this way, Ezra answering so steadily that she is comforted. Years later, a faded paper chain still hangs from a light fixture in the dining room. The cousins made it for a Christmas dinner there that also broke up in a quarrel, and Ezra has never taken it down. For anyone who has sat at a holiday table waiting for the first raised voice, there are few more honest family novels.
Cody and the Tyranny of Minutes
Cody is the book’s most uncomfortable creation, because his grievances are partly fair. Pearl did favour Ezra, and everyone knew it. Cody grows up handsome, competitive and furious, becomes a hugely successful efficiency consultant, a trade built on time and motion study, and admits to his son that he would board a time machine tomorrow if one existed. He wants the clock back. He wants, in the end, a childhood he did not get.
His pursuit of Ruth is the cruellest thing in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, and it includes letters he forges from invented friends to turn her against fair-haired men. Tyler lets him win her and then shows what winning costs: a marriage spent watching for his brother’s shadow, a household that moves to a new town every few months so that nobody can settle.
The Girl in the Bottom Drawer
The finest chapter in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler belongs to Pearl in old age. By 1979 she is nearly blind and too proud to admit it, and Ezra, still living with her in the Calvert Street house, reads aloud from the girlhood diaries in her desk. She has him skip past relatives and party photos. She is listening only for herself: a teenager weighing herself at a store in town, trimming hats, fending off callers, waiting for a life to begin. Ezra suddenly grasps that this stranger and his mother are the same person. An afternoon at an Orioles game, with Ezra slipping her the play-by-play so she can pretend she sees it, is almost unbearably tender.
Ezra’s gentleness gets its sternest examination here. Tyler suggests that his willingness to let things be is the source of his happiness and also his undoing. He has never married, never fought for what he lost, and stayed exactly where he started, reading cookbooks in bed in the house he grew up in. The book admires him and grieves for him in the same breath.
What Holds the Novel Back
Not every thread gets equal care. Jenny’s three marriages arrive largely in summary: the first husband, a geneticist obsessed with order and with her weight, is a cartoon, the second vanishes before he becomes a person, and the third brings six stepchildren and a chapter crowded with them. Her sharpest moment, a buried memory of what exhaustion once drove her to, lands with real force, but it lands in passing, and the novel hurries back to the brothers.
The middle of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler can also feel airless. Grievance piles on grievance, the comedy grows quieter, and readers who want momentum will find long stretches where nothing much happens except remembering. The novel also asks readers to sit with violence by a parent, abandonment, illness and dying, and some period slurs.
The Woman Who Wrote Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler was born in 1941 and married the Iranian psychiatrist and novelist Taghi Modarressi in 1963. The couple settled in Baltimore, which has been the stage for almost all her novels since, and this ninth one was the book in which critics agreed she had arrived. It came within reach of the Pulitzer and was a finalist for four other major American prizes, and its successor, The Accidental Tourist, won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
For decades Tyler famously avoided interviews and book tours. When she finally sat down with a newspaper interviewer in 2012, her first face-to-face conversation with the press in nearly forty years, she named this novel as her best. Baltimore has returned the affection: visitors can follow Anne Tyler walking tours around her Roland Park neighbourhood. Her late work is gentler but recognisably the same sensibility, as the recent Three Days in June by Anne Tyler shows.
What It Leaves Behind
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler is a holiday-table novel without a single neat reconciliation scene, which is why it rings true. It is about the meals that never finish and the people who keep turning up for them anyway. Readers who love it should try Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo, whose mother is as complicated as Pearl and as hard to forgive, and Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout, which shares Tyler’s eye for how little we know the people we grew up beside. Both pair well with a long weekend and a table that may or may not hold together.