Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant

DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT
by Anne Tyler

 Nominations: LA Times Finalist 1982, National Book Finalist 1983, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 1982, NY Times Finalist 1982, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 1983, Pulitzer Finalist 1983

 Date Read: August 15, 2019

 I honestly expected to enjoy this more than I actually did. Full disclosure: My childhood closely resembled that of Pearl's three children. This could be a contributing factor but, honestly, I don't care for Pearl or her kids as people.

 While Pearl has her deep flaws and is obviously not the best mother ever to grace fiction, she has some admirable qualities. She faces single motherhood with courage and tries to do right by her kids. She clearly loves them in her own defective way. But she's clearly not a warm person, never finding comfort in friendship or extended family. She isolates herself and her kids in a strange, interdependent cocoon. This is painfully obvious at Jenny's first wedding when the only people attending on the bride's side are her mother and brothers.

 Pearl demands loyalty and allegiance and is threatened when she her kids begin to branch out. Her mother always thinks and voices the worst opinions about her kids. She never offers the benefit of the doubt about their behavior. I largely suspect this is because she is measuring their behavior against the barometer of her mothering, constantly trying to assess whether she did a good job. Towards the end, it becomes painfully obvious that both Cody and Jenny are walking the very same path as parents as their mother did.

 Ultimately, I think the point of Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant is an exploration of the depth of human character. No one person is entirely good; nor are they entirely bad. People are incredibly complex and cannot be judged by only one aspect of their personality. To do so would be to dismiss the richness lying underneath the surface of one's faults. And one uniting element of humanity is that we all have faults, yet we still long to be loved and accepted for the extraordinariness of what makes us who we are.

 Looking Forward: The Accidental Tourist, The Beginner's Goodbye, Breathing Lessons, Clock Dance, Digging To America, Ladder Of Years, Morgan's Passing, Redhead By The Side Of The Road, A Spool Of Blue Thread

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