Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

I've read and enjoyed many Anne Tyler novels over the years, but somehow Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, long time staple of high school readings lists, had passed me by. My husband was astonished when I said I'd never read it; it's one of the few books he'd read and I hadn't (not anymore, ha ha). This copy, which I found in a street library, was clearly a high school text -- it was almost destroyed with highlights, underlinings and graffiti in the margins, not to mention chewed and folded corners. I have to say this is by far the least attractive cover for this novel I've seen, too -- presumably this character is supposed to be scrappy tomboy Ruth, but this Ruth has a far too knowing smirk, when really she's a kind of innocent.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is essentially a story of intergenerational trauma. It opens with Pearl Tull on her deathbed, reflecting on the amazing job she's done raising her three children alone after her husband Beck walked out on them. But we soon see, in flashbacks of the family history, that Pearl is a pretty terrible mother -- violent, abusive, volatile, prickly. Each of her three children carries the legacy of their childhood in a different way, but all are scarred to some degree, and we see that damage passed on in turn to their own children. I can see why it was such a popular set text -- mind you, my husband couldn't recall anything from his Year 11 study, so it didn'tmake that much of an impression.

In many ways, Dinner at the HS is the quintessential Tyler novel -- family dynamics, set in Baltimore, the passage of time, misunderstandings and wilful contradictions, but at the end of the day, the ties of family and shared history (even when it's experienced very differently between the players) create some kind of wavering, uncertain bond.