I wish the author had written a sequel- I really want to know where their lives went after this book.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler | Goodreads

A: I do think a character’s feeling about food is a wonderful shorthand device for the writer. In place of “feeders” and “nonfeeders,” we could say “givers” and “non-givers,” and in place of “eaters” and “non-eaters,”“enjoyers” and “non-enjoyers”–two very important sets of personality traits. A classic of contemporary Americana... variously funny and horrifying and finally, quietly, terribly moving Los Angeles Times witty, animated, forthright in speech, yet skeptically withdrawn from those who should be closest to her. (Miss Tyler has created, in her books, a half-dozen individual, idiosyncratically charming, completely believable young women;And everywhere there's a marvelous delicacy of finish, witness Pearl Tull's drifting remembrance as she falls off into her long sleep: ''She remembered the feel of wind on summer nights - how it billows through the house and wafts in Ezra, a hint of the unposturing selflessness whose effect on people denied faith in the possibility of human purity is invariably to intensify cynicism. ''Cody hated the radiant, grave expression that Ezra wore sometimes; molto probabile che il primo passo l’ho fatto sull’onda del buon film di Lawrence Kasdan (che a quell’epoca per tutti noi era un faro: in pochi anni Body Heat - Brivido caldo, The Big Chill - Il grande freddo, Silverado, The Accidental Tourist - Turista per caso, poi più niente di notevole). That was the evening that Cody first got his strange notion. It came about so suddenly: they were playing Monopoly on Cody's bed, the three of them, and Cody was winning as usual and offering Luke a loan to keep going. "Oh, well, no. I guess I've lost," said Luke. isn't off to a roaring start for me. Twice now, I've been foiled by much beloved books. Anne Tyler now joins the ranks of John Boyne in the club I am now naming: "I came, I saw, I shrugged."

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant : Tyler, Anne : Free Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant : Tyler, Anne : Free

This book is about family and the memories we keep about our childhood. Why does one choose to remember only the bad, and the other the good? But it's also the case that what is best in each of these people, as in their mother, has its roots in the experience of deprivation that they jointly despise. Jenny's outward exuberance flows from instinctive knowledge of how overwhelming the Tyler shifts perspectives with enviable ease. The book consists of 10 chapters, and we see things from Pearl's perspective – both as a dying 80-something woman and as a young woman, wife and mother – then we see things from the vantage point of eldest son Cody, who's handsome and clever but with a cruel streak; daughter Jenny, who marries three times and becomes a pediatrician who's more comfortable dealing with her patients than those closest to her; and Ezra, a calm, placid, clear-eyed kid who wants nothing more than for everyone to get along. Late in the novel, we even get a chapter from the point of view of one of the Tull siblings' children, and it's a fantastic chapter, full of cautionary stories about other dysfunctional families.

This was a feel-good book - and in that respect it truly did it's job. I was coming off a book that was very dark and I needed to read something that offered lighter fare. This book was nominated for the 1983 Pulitzer prize ( The Color Purple won that year), which surprises me. This strikes me as 'lite' literary fiction. But, she was nominated for a swath of other awards for this book. And her readers are exuberant and consistently positive. So I'm definitely an outlier here. he thought of dying as a kind of adventure, something new that he hadn't yet experienced. Like an unusual vacation trip.”

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Penguin Random House Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Penguin Random House

Pearl Tull, the cloud-wearing sun around whom the other characters orbit -- as close as Mercury, as far away as Neptune, or somewhere between the two -- has a "favorite expression": "'I wouldn't know you if I saw you on the street'" (274). But I know her and just about everyone whose life she has affected.Negli anni Novanta del secolo scorso mi sono dedicato abbastanza alla lettura dei romanzi di Ann Tyler: ho letto sempre e solo romanzi, mai racconti. Anche perché mi risultano usciti solo su riviste, mai in raccolta. I feel the place is falling apart on me, but Mrs. Scarlatti says not to worry. It always looks like that, she says. Life is a continual shoring up, she says, against one thing and another just eroding and crumbling away. I'm beginning to think she's right.” He was wondering if there was some cryptic, cultish mark on his door that told all the crazy people he'd have trouble saying no.” She wondered if her children blamed her for something. Sitting close at family gatherings ... they tended to recall only poverty and loneliness - toys she couldn't afford for them, parties where they weren't invited. all three are linked somehow with the terrible, never-explained rupture: their father's disappearance.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: A Novel Kindle Edition

Their growing up amounted, therefore, to a gradual dimming of the light at her bedroom door, as if they took some radiance with them as they moved away from her. She should have planned for it better, she sometimes thought. She should have made a few friends or joined a club. But she wasn’t the type. It wouldn’t have consoled her.” the risk of forgetting how to take our present selves for granted. And down that road there's a risk of starting to treat life as a mystery instead of the way smart people treat it - as a set of done and undone errands. No way, Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life.The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common. Their youngest, David, is already intent on escaping his family's orbit, for reasons none of them understand. Yet, as these lives advance across decades, the Garretts' influences on one another ripple ineffably but unmistakably through each generation.