Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Ratings27
Average rating3.7
I was about to give up on this book at about the half way mark as it was just trudging along, but I suddenly started to connect with the characters and liked the second half well enough. All over, it is probably my least favorite of Anne Tyler's works.
This is one of the best books I've ever read.
I'm reading this and I keep thinking “so THIS is what Jonathan Franzen wants to write...”
I don't understand how she does it. It's at the same time raw and awful and crude and cruel and so very soft, sensitive, subtle, and kind.
And then the ending... I kept hating Pearl and despising Beck, and none of the characters was really likable, but... they were so... real. They weren't supposed to be likable. People aren't likable. They do sometimes nice things and then they do horrible things, and... it really doesn't matter. People are people. The ending made it all all right. It's OK. Good enough. Fine. Everything is fine. It was a very satisfying end.
I was discussing this with my husband. I like endings that wrap things up but don't end the story. All these people will continue their lives and have more stories to tell, but I am satisfied and pleased, and I love this book.
This book is definitely well-written and drew me in. But I did not enjoy reading it, mostly because the characters were all so unlikeable. There wasn't one character among this conflicted family that I thought, aha, this is the person I can latch on to. The readability kept me going, and I also was kind of holding on to hope that someone would make a turnaround, but in general, just bleh.
Matt just finished listening to the audio of The Girl on the Train (which I have not read). He described it as “full of horrible people who can't stop meddling in other people's business.”
In return, I described Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant to him as “full of semi-horrible people who are all related to each other and keep doing horrible things to intentionally hurt each other.”
That pretty much sums it up...
I started out writing that I thought Anne Tyler was an under-appreciated writer, and then I remember that she won a Pulitzer, so perhaps that's not exactly the correct term.
I think people don't realize the skill it takes to write her novels. While I haven't read all her work, the common thread, for me, is that she writes about ordinary people in ordinary situations. She doesn't write Jodi Picoult novels - these are the “headline-of-the-month” type stories; they also aren't thrillers, or mysteries, or any of those other types of books that sell a bajilion copies. This is just an ordinary family, doing ordinary things, with ordinary conflicts and troubles. And somehow in Tyler's hands, their story becomes utterly fascinating. She has a way of taking characters that are not the most likable - sometimes even pretty distasteful - and teasing out the bit of humanity that allows her readers to sympathize with even the hardest cases.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant isn't really about anything - and yet somehow, it's about everything. Recommended.
My first Anne Tyler book, which I read in about 1980. She has been one of my favorite authors ever since. I picked up all of her prior books and read them, and now I make it a point to read all her new books as they are published.
