This is my first time to read 3 books by an author in succession: one, two, three... Just like the saying when it rains, it pours, I am having an Anne Tyler Book Festival. After reading her The Accidental Tourist I went to the bookstore and bought Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and read right away. Then last Friday, when I was winding down with the second book, I bought Breathing Lessons and I am now reading it. The whole experience is like finding a gold mine. Here is Anne Tyler who I never More...

Now this is great literature! It follows the lives of three siblings: Cody is bitter & envious, Ezra kind but excessively passive and Jenn is overly impulsive with a penchant for marrying the wrong men. After their father deserts the family they’re left to be raised by their mother Pearl Tull, a rigid perfectionist with a definite mean streak. What struck a chord for me was how all three children growing up in the same household could all remember their childhood so differently. I thought it More...

This is Anne Tyler's best work. There are no lovable characters but there is no need for someone to love. The story is enough. It's a fantastic labyrinth of bitterness. Eventually, you end up loving to hate all of them.

This book started out slow, but was pretty engaging once you got into it. Homesick is the story of a family. A very dysfunctional family. Of course, who's family isn't dysfunctional, right? This is sort of the point it seems to me.

Each chapter is some part of the family story and each one is told from a different point of view. The mother, the father and the three children are all so very different from one another, but are held together somewhat tenuously by their family ties. The father walke More...

At first, I didn't care about any of the children in this book, and by the end, I mostly hated them. This book was dull and disappointing, with an ending that made me furious. But this was also one of those books that, after glaring at it for a few day and letting it soak in, I realized it accomplished it's goal. It evoked something in me, at least, in the end. Though the cover and synopsis might lead you to believe otherwise, this is no beach read. But the fact that I read it over a year ago an More...

Cant I love a book just because reading it was something like the warmth of a summer breeze? The characters maybe flawed, the on start might not be so engaging but once you settle down in the story, the interest deepens and you are not even halfway through and you decide that this the sort of stuff you have got to like. It would take a lot not to love the story of a mother, her three difficult children, a home that is left fatherless not because of death but a sudden caprice. Or something that h More...

Being unfamiliar with Anne Tyler's works, I was a little worried that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (a book group pick) would be another subpar contemporary work with no laudable literary qualities. Though not a home run for me (it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award in 1983), Homesick Restaurant vastly exceeded my low expectations and turned out to be an enjoyable and interesting read.

This well-written novel follows the Tull family through life, beginning with P More...

Tyler's humor, her sense of place, her eccentric characters, her use of language, and her lyrical descriptions are magnificent. Anne Tyler says that Eudora Welty has been the most influential on her writing and the admiration is mutual, as shown by Welty's comment about this novel: "If I could have written the last sentence in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant I'd have been happy for the rest of my life" (Welty in Salwak, p. 11)

Tolstoy famously wrote that "Happy families are all alike; every unh More...

Since I finished DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT yesterday, I have started at least five very different reviews of the novel. I've got a bad case of Prufrockitis. I'm stuck on the "overwhelming question": What am I really willing to pay attention to? As Tyler's work reminds us, what we pay attention to, not only reveals who we are, but also --to a great extent -- shapes who we become. And yet, despite its importance, this point is not what I want to focus on. That I keep discarding drafts of r More...

This was my first Anne Tyler and I really liked it. Her characters are so real. They are capable of being so flawed and yet so good at the same time. Her style is also so down to earth, which renders her stories more believable.
A family reunites in the last days of its matriarch's life. The point of view shifts between the four main characters, giving a very complete picture of the history of the family. What I love about the book is that, as with its characters, it weaves easily between traged More...

I read this book for a class my last year at BYU, and I loved it. It's one of my favorite books of all time. It's told from the alternating points of view of these 3 kids and their mom, and it spans from when they are young until they are grown and have kids of their own. It's often sad and depressing, and you won't always like all of the characters, but you will probably love them, like you would your own family. I honestly think that anyone who doesn't love Ezra, you might not be human. A trul More...

If you have not ever read this book, stop reading this review right now, go pick it up, and don't do anything else until you're done. If you're still reading this then you're either disobedient or you know how truly fabulous this novel is. Anne Tyler is an absolutely genius writer. She takes a series of events that are seemingly nothing--seriously, nothing of "consequence" really happens in this book--but you're captivated from the first chapter.

As I was reading I found myself feeling sympathy f More...

A loving dysfuntionality… Anne Tyler knows people well. Not just people who are quirky, cruel, venomous, scheming, or famous. She seems to have a place in her heart for families that are dysfunctional and functioning anyways. A colleague of mine describes a good day at work as being, “about 4 or 5 steps up from complete chaos”. The setting of a low bar seems to make any experience enriching just for the few good surprises you may see – someone trying to lend some structure to an unstable family, More...

With Anne Tyler, you know what to expect. The good news and the bad news is that she delivers to those expectations every time. She is one of my go-to authors when I need something engaging, but not particularly demanding.

Entertaining read about her hallmark assortment of every-day characters with beautifully articulated quirks and semi-functional relationships.

One of Ms. TYler's consistent theme is the profound impact we have on the lives of those close to us -- Despite all measures we may ta More...

Every year, I think Sandra Cisneros bribes the English curriculum writers to try to find a book so bad it will make kids forget about reading The House on Mango Street. This is the closest the curriculum writers have come so far. This is one of the most boring books I have ever read. It is also very depressing. I couldn't care less what happens to some dysfunctional family in Baltimore. I honestly feel the most empathy toward them when I find out they are Orioles fans. (The Orioles are almost as More...

When my friends first mentioned Anne Tyler’s “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” to me, I kept misquoting the book title in our conversation, and it simply refused to stick. I suspect part of me was repulsed by a restaurant named Homesick. I was afraid it would turn out to be a sentimental, soppy tale. It did not.

The story was set in Baltimore "where houses were dark and deep and secretive." It was 1944. Pearl Tull’s husband (Beck) had walked out of their marriage and left her alone to raise thr More...

I have always loved Anne Tyler. Her books are always about people and relationships and she has a way of capturing people and their thoughts.

Spoiler alert: This discusses plot and characters.

This book, however, really did not do it for me. It has a dysfunctional family at its core with essentially no likable characters. The mother, Pearl, is left by her husband who never makes contact with the three children he walked out on. Pearl is insufferable both to others and to her children. She can be c More...

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant




1st edition cover



Author(s)

Anne Tyler



Country

United States



Language

English



Publisher

Knopf



Publication date

March 12, 1982



Media type

Print (Hardcover and Paperback)



Pages

303 pp



ISBN

0-394-52381-4



OCLC Number

7732718



Dewey Decimal

813/.54 19



LC Classification

PS3570.Y45 D5 1982


Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a 1982 novel by Anne Tyler set in Baltimore, Maryland.

The book follows the lives of three siblings: Cody, Ezra, and Jenny, and explores their experiences and recollectio More...

Geez Louise, this book was detailed. This is my first Anne Tyler read, and boy does she have a way of penning characters to the point that you feel that there is NO way that this book is fiction-these characters must be real. And oh, did I hate and love these characters. Pearl, the mother, was a complicated beast. I must admit that I loathed her. But what a product of her time she was. Perfectly proper. Perfectly judgmental. Oy. Her children were equally complex but I adored them, faults and all More...

Anne Tyler is super at writing about families and their struggles. This was a hard book to read because there was so much family sadness, but it was very sensitive, with extremely sympathetic characters. Pearl Tuill is nearing the end of her life and recalling her life raising her three children in Baltimore after her husband left. She managed but without much joy. "Often, like a child peering over the fence at somebody else's party, she gazes wistfully at other families and wonders what their s More...

"While Pearl Tull was dying, a funny thought occured to her."

I was just going to read this first sentence and then put the book down, but how do you stop reading with a first sentence like that? First, I wondered what the thought was, and secondly, it occured to me that I wouldn't expect funny, random things to come to mind while dying. Wouldn't it trivialize the whole all-encompassing fact that your life is ending?

It captured my interest, and really, the whole book was the same - highlighting t More...

Tolstoy's famous first line from Anna Karenina was made for the Tulls: ""Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The unique form of unhappiness that is the Tulls is expressed in their ironic inability to finishing a meal at the Homesick Restaurant. Each time they gather at the restaurant to celebrate or mourn, come together as a family, they find a way to quibble, harass and fight. They alienate, dispute, belittle, and generally irritate each other to the p More...

Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not of her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore’s Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children alone: Jenny, high-spirited and determined, nurturing to strangers but distant to those she loves; the older son, Cody, a wild and incorrigible youth possessed by the lure of power and money; and sweet, clumsy Ezra, Pearl’s favourite, who never stops yearning for the perfect family t More...

This is the story of the Tull family. Pearl, a single mother, is now at the end of her life. She is blind, tough, and unable to accept anything less than that her life is acceptable. But now, she sifts through the memories she has in search of something that affirms her life has meaning. We are able to read the story of how she got here through the eyes of her children and grandchildren. Cody, her eldest, is the most like his absent father. What matters to him is power, money, respect, and appea More...

A portrait of a completely dysfunctional family, written in a eerily clinical, neat way, which sometimes seemed weirdly appropriate, but sometimes did not allow me to connect with any of the characters.
This book is basically a case study, a psychologist's wet dream, because it opens up so many family-related issues, and considers the question of how we repeat the same mistakes our parents made or, exactly the opposite, create our own mistakes because we are bending over backwards trying not to b More...

It's hard for me to say how I felt about this book. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it either. It was sad. I felt sad reading it which strangely is the part I liked about it. But I also expected throughout the entire book that something good would happen that would heal this family of the wounds an abusive mother and abandoning father inflict on their small children. I kept looking for the one member that would get it all together and find that space in life where they were or can be happy. More...

I think one of the reasons I enjoy Anne Tyler's books so much is the anti-heroic aspect of her characters. Each is imperfect and quirky, but somehow they all begin to grow on you. The interaction among them constitutes much of the story and certainly the reason I get drawn in; the family, one begins to realize, is like all families, perhaps a little like your own in some ways. The imperfections are typical of people one meets and associates with every day.

In an interview included with the downlo More...

I enjoyed the book, and there really wasn't anything wrong with it. I just can't say I "really liked" reading a book filled with so many painful family-induced tragedies. I just wanted to throttle some of the antagonists. I really liked the book for what it was, but I couldn't exactly clap my hands together gleefully in that "really liked it" way the way I would if someone put a plate of, say, tiramisu in front of me because, you know, I really like tiramisu.

All that said, the characters were so More...