Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (Criticism)

Criticism

Diane Henningfeld

Henningfeld is a professor of English at Adrian College. In the following essay, she traces the critical history of Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and explores the various psychological interpretations of the novel.

Anne Tyler published her ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1982. Set in Baltimore, the novel tells the story of Pearl Tull and her children, Cody, Ezra and Jenny, as they attempt to come to terms with a pivotal event, their abandonment by Beck Tull, husband to Pearl and father to the children.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant received excellent reviews on its publication. In the New York Times Book Review, Benjamin DeMott called it "a border crossing" for Tyler, a book which pushes her "deep into truth." Likewise, John Updike wrote that Tyler had reached "a new level of power, and gives us a lucid and delightful yet complex and somber improvisation on her favorite theme, family life."

Not all reviewers, however, described Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant so positively. Vivian Gornick in The Village Voice accused Tyler of "arrested development" because of the lack of sexual energy in her novel. She called Tyler's prose "sexually anesthetized." James Wolcott, in a review for Esquire, suggested that the novel "is hobbled from page one on by its rickety plot structure."

Anne Tyler provides for us the way she thinks about Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in an interview with Sarah English: "I think what I was doing was saying, 'Well, all right, I've joked about families long enough; let me tell you what I really believe about them." A number of critics write extensively on just what it is that Tyler believes about families, using Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant as their evidence. For example, Anne Hall Petry argues in Understanding Anne Tyler that what Tyler "really believes" can be uncovered by a close examination of the word homesick. The word operates on three levels, according to Petry: homesick, as caused by a longing for home when one is away from home; homesick, as in sick of home, a condition often felt by children eager to be on their own; and homesick, as in sick from home, a psychological or emotional illness caused by the home environment.

Certainly, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant can be read from a number of different critical approaches. For example, it is possible to read the novel as a sociological study of abuse and isolation. Because Pearl is so concerned with keeping up the appearances of a happy family, she hides the fact of Beck's desertion from her children, her neighbors, her family, and even her closest friend. Elizabeth Evans argues that the "most poignant example" of Pearl's isolation occurs when she "refuses to allow herself to confide in her old friend Emmaline." Further, the isolation and responsibility of being a single parent cause such strain for Pearl that she often attacks her own children in verbal and physical abuse, as Jenny recalls: "Which of her children had not felt her stinging slap, with the claw-encased pearl in her engagement ring that could bloody a lip at one flick?. She herself, more than once had been slammed against a wall, been called 'serpent,' 'cockroach,' 'hideous little sniveling guttersnipe.'" Tellingly, just as sociological studies demonstrate, the pattern of abuse repeats itself. When Jenny is a single parent herself, trying to care for her infant daughter Becky while coping with medical school, she finds herself abusing her own daughter: "She slammed Becky's face into her Peter Rabbit dinner plate and gave her a bloody nose. She yanked a handful of hair. All her childhood returned to her."

Other critics choose to read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant from a psychological perspective. In such a reading, the critic often concentrates on the effect of Beck's absence on each of the children, noting the way that their development and maturity have been damaged by their father's desertion. Joseph B. Wagner goes so far as to suggest that Beck's departure is the "single most powerful factor in the development of the central characters. The rest of their lives are so molded by that departure that their personalities correspond to psychoanalytic profiles of children who, at similar ages, are also abandoned by their fathers."

In another psychological study, Joseph C. Voelker sees in each of the children the idealization process. Each child longs for and attempts to recreate the ideal family for himself or herself. Cody, for example, longs for a mother who stays at home and visits with other housewives. Later, he buys a farmhouse and imagines himself settling in with his family, something he never does in reality. Ezra idealizes the notion of the family dinner at his business, The Homesick Restaurant. Although someone (usually Pearl) always explodes into anger each time he tries to arrange the perfect family dinner, he nonetheless repeats the scene throughout the book. Rather than starting a family himself, he nurtures strangers by providing them with food. Jenny goes through three marriages trying to find the perfect family. In her third marriage, to a man who has six children and who has been abandoned by his wife, she finds her ideal: the sheer activity of raising so many children protects her from emotional investment in them.

Finally, it is possible to examine Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant from a formal approach. That is, by examining the literary tools Tyler uses to construct her novel, we can begin to understand not only what the novel means but also how it means. One critic who takes a formal approach to the novel is Donna Gerstenberger. In her essay, "Everybody Speaks," she examines the narrative voice Tyler constructs for her novel. Gerstenberger writes that this voice is one of "calm reasonableness," and that she "democratically parcels out reason and unreason so evenly, individual voices in her novels seem to have an equal claim on the reader." In other words, each of the points of view Tyler uses in Dinnerat the Homesick Restaurant helps to establish that none of the characters is all good, or all bad, all sane or all insane. This evenness in voice allows us to read all of the characters sympathetically.

Similarly, a formal approach often takes into account images and metaphors. By comparing an abstract idea to something concrete, the writer is able to reveal her meaning subtly. Robert W. Croft argues that food is the central metaphor of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Food represents physical and emotional nurturing. Thus, in the early part of the book, Pearl's refusal to feed her children adequately becomes symbolic of her inability to emotionally nurture the children. After a particularly violent episode of abuse, for example, "Cody had such a loaded feeling in his throat, he never wanted to eat again." Jenny's abuse of her daughter Becky occurs as she tries to feed her.

Tyler often uses food in moments of healing in the book, as well. When Jenny suffers a nervous breakdown, her mother feeds her and helps her to regain her health. Ezra repeatedly tries to heal his family by planning and hosting family dinners at the Homesick Restaurant. By the end of the book, it seems at least possible that the family will be able to complete one dinner together, although even here Tyler leaves us in doubt. The long-absent Beck agrees to come to the dinner, but says, "I warn you, I plan to leave before that dessert wine's poured."

Just as food is a paradox in that it represents both moments of violence and of healing, there are other telling paradoxes and contradictions in the story. As Gerstenberger argues, each of the characters shares in the telling of the story of the Tull family, and thus each seems to wield equal authority in the telling. Nonetheless, each character's story is self-contradictory. For example, Cody, the child who feels the most anger at his father's departure, manages to recreate his father's life in his own family. As a successful efficiency engineer, he moves his family from town to town, never letting them put down roots or establish themselves. Ironically, it is Cody who seems to make peace with his father by the end of the book and it is Cody who reintegrates his father back into the family: "Cody held on to his elbow and led him toward the others." Jenny, too, provides us with a model of self-contradiction. Throughout the book, she seems to be the child most affected by Pearl's abuse. When she is at home with her mother after Cody has left for college and Ezra has left for the army, she is uneasy and has nightmares that her mother is a witch. Nonetheless, after she leaves home and her first marriage begins to fail, she returns home. In the place where she was least safe as a child, she feels most safe as an adult: "She loosened; she was safe at last, in the only place where people knew exactly who she was and loved her anyway."

And perhaps this is what Tyler "really believes" about families: that they are themselves paradoxical and self-contradictory. Families are havens as well as prisons, the place of much joy and the place of much sorrow. By the end of the book, we see that each Tull child has created and recreated his or her life and family through the act of memory. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, memory is like nothing so much as one of Ezra's recipes. Each character, through the act of memory, experiments with what to leave in and what to take out, adjusting here and there, like adding salt to stew. Beck's arrival in the closing pages of the book provides the missing ingredient that each has struggled to find throughout the book. There are still troubling and contradictory messages on the closing pages. During his mother's funeral, for example, Cody reflects "That her life had been very long indeed, but never full; stunted was more like it." Nevertheless, Cody's final memories of his mother are of her "upright form along the grasses, her hair lit gold, her small hands smoothing her bouquet while the arrow joumeyed on." These peaceful, positive memories suggest, at least, that the family story can always be revised.

Source: Diane Henningfeld, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and other Stories, Carson McCullers's 1951 novel. Considered by many critics to be the author's finest work, this story is about a twisted love triangle in a small southern town during the 1940s.
• As I Lay Dying. In William Faulkner's 1930 novel, the dying matriarch Addie Bundren bears many similarities to Pearl Tull in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. The two novels are also somewhat alike structurally.
• Anne Tyler's Pulitzer Prize-nominated 1985 novel The Accidental Tourist is about a travel writer coping with the loss of his only son.
• The Portable Chekhov. Published in 1947, this volume includes twenty-eight short stories, two plays, and a vivid selection of letters by Anton Chekhov, generally considered one of the greatest and most prolific Russian writers.