Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.5/5.0 - Pearl is almost a spinster, when Beck, a traveling salesman meets and marries her. They have three children, Cody, Ezra and Jenny, before he leaves for a sales trip one day and doesn't come back. Each child views their childhood differently. Cody believes that his mother favored Ezra over him, and in fact, that most people did. He steals the woman that Ezra plans to marry, to prove to himself that he can do something better than him. He is successful and travels for his job as an efficiency expert, just like his father, but insists on bringing his father to each new town with him. Ezra, on the other hand, sticks close to home, working at a restaurant that he eventually inherits, and renames the Homesick Restaurant. His greatest dream, similar to his mother's, is to have family dinners there, but until the very end, it never seems to work out. Jenny, the youngest, grows up feeling like an ugly duckling, but does well in school and becomes a physician, and marries three times, eventually ending up with a blended family of eight.
Anne Tyler's books don't seem to have much action in them, they are more about examining what it means - to be alive, to be human, to have a family, or be married. This book was well received, receiving the following awards: Pulitzer Prize Nominee for Fiction (1983), PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Nominee (1983), Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Fiction (1982), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Fiction (1982), National Book Award Finalist for Fiction (Hardcover) (1983). They just take a different mindset to read, you must be willing to take time with them, read them closely and over time, reflect upon them.
Pop Sugar #14: A book set in a restaurant
Book 62 of 2021


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