Search results
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a 1982 novel by Anne Tyler, set in Baltimore, Maryland. It is Tyler's ninth novel. In 1983 it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, [1] the National Book Award, [2] and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Tyler considers it her best work. The book follows the lives of three siblings: Cody, Ezra, and Jenny, and explores ...
- Anne Tyler
- 1982
A brief essay on the role of memory in Tyler's novels. Alice Hall Petty, "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant," in her Understanding Anne Tyler, University of South Carolina Press, 1990, pp. 186-209 ...
Mar 12, 1982 · March 16, 2020. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a character-driven story about the Tulls, a Baltimore family consisting of Pearl, the mother, and her three children: Cody, Jenny, and Ezra. Pearl, now older and in poor health, is reflecting on past memories of her life and her family. Cody, Jenny, and Ezra are fairly dissimilar and have all ...
- (32K)
- Paperback
- Anne Tyler
Another of Tyler's family portraits: again she draws forth that elusive aura of redemptive family unity—despite snapped loyalties, devastating loneliness, and the conflicts between those who hit life hard and those who live life at a slant. Ezra Tull—one of Tyler's gentle, bumbling men—is, unlike his meddlesome, reproachful mother Pearl, a feeder. And at his Homesick Restaurant, an ...
- Kirkus Reviews
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Media Adaptations
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
Critics generally consider Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler's ninth novel, to be among her best work. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award and the 1983 Pulitzer Prize. Also a commercial success, it has to date sold more than 60,000 copies in hardcover and more than 655,000...
Anne Tyler was born on October 25, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to chemist Lloyd Parry Tyler and social worker Phyllis Mahon Tyler. The daughter of Quakers, hers was a somewhat nomadic childhood, living in such places as Chicago; Duluth, Minnesota; and Cleo, North Carolina (in which her family lived in an experimental collective community in th...
Part I: Pearl
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurantis the story of the Tull family of Baltimore, Maryland, told first from the perspective of Pearl Tull, and then from the perspective of each of her children, Cody, Ezra, and Jennifer. Because the novel is told from differing points of view, readers often witness the same event several times, with different emphasis. Chapter One, "Something You Should Know," opens as Pearl Tull lies dying in her Baltimore home. Her son Ezra sits next to her. She recalls her lif...
Part II: The Family
Each of the next chapters of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurantis a self-contained unit, told from the point of view of one of the children. Taken together, they allow the reader to follow each of the children through adulthood. Cody's story opens before his father has left, on the day that Cody accidently shoots his mother with an arrow when Ezra interferes with his aim. From here the competition Cody feels with Ezra grows. Over the years, Cody engages in an unending series of sneaky tricks t...
Part III: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
The concluding chapter of the book opens with the news of Pearl's death, told from Cody's point of view. All the members of Pearl's family gather for her funeral, and Cody discovers that Ezra has invited their father to attend. After the funeral ends, an old man approaches Cody, who suddenly recognizes him as their father. All of the Tulls, including the long-absent Beck, head to The Homesick Restaurant for the funeral dinner. This time it is Cody who loses his temper. "You think we're a fami...
Harley Baines
Harley is the first of Jenny Tull's three husbands. Intellectual Harley shares at least one similarity with his mother-in-law, Pearl: They are both obsessively organized. For example, Harley arranges his textbooks "by height and blocks of color." A minor, comical character.
Becky
Unable to properly handle the pressures of medical school, Jenny vents her frustrations by physically and emotionally abusing her only biological child, Becky. Fortunately, Jenny realizes the damage she is inflicting and enlists the aid of Pearl to temporarily care for her young daughter. Becky grows up to develop some eating disorders(like her mother once had), but whether this is due to heredity or environment is left unexplained in the novel.
Emmaline
One of Pearl Tull's few close friends, Emmaline is the only woman with whom Pearl almost shares her secret that Beck has abandoned her and the children.
A 1985 audio recording of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurantis available on two cassettes from Random House Audio.Another of Tyler's novels, The Accidental Tourist, was filmed in 1988 with William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and Geena Davis (who won an Oscar for her role). The film also was cited by the New YorkFil...Alienation and Loneliness
The related themes of alienation and loneliness permeate this novel about the impact of a father's desertion on his wife and family. In the pivotal character of Pearl Tull, Tyler gives us an extremely alienated individual, at least in the sense of being alienated from her community. After Beck deserts her (after more than fifteen years of marriage), she determines to raise her three children singlehandedly, without the slightest assistance from anyone in the neighborhood. Since she can't even...
Discuss the changes that have occurred in the American family's structure from 1930 to the present. Compare and contrast the Tull family against different American families today.Explore the ways in which individuals can prevent child abuseand how to deal with it if it occurs.Discuss the heredity versus environment question. How much of who we are is determined by genes, and how much is determined by our home environment? Give some examples of specific scientific studie...Point of View
One of the principal strengths of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurantis that it is told from so many different points of views so effectively. Of the novel's ten chapters, two belong to Pearl, two to Jenny, two to Ezra, three to Cody, and one to Cody's son, Luke. Each of the chapters reveals something unique or unusual about the character from whose point of view dominates. As a result of alternating the narration, the reader understands the main characters better than they understand themselves.
Setting
The setting for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurantis mostly Baltimore, Maryland, a city that figures prominently in many Tyler novels. Pearl has spent most of her adult life there; Ezra has lived almost all of his life in this city; Jenny, with the exception of her college and medical school years, is a Baltimorean; only the nomadic Cody, whose jobs and upward mobility require much travel and moving, spends considerably less time in Baltimore. The time frame of the novel covers roughly fifty-f...
Symbolism
The title of the novel refers to Ezra's restaurant, an eating place he inherited from his business partner, Mrs. Scarlatti. As many critics have stressed, "homesick" has many different meanings. It can mean "sick for home" (this best applies to Jenny), "sick at home" (Ezra), and "sick from home" (Cody). The concept of time is symbolic for time management consultant Cody, who often desires to escape from unpleasant moments in the present by stepping into pleasant past moments. "If only Einstei...
Child Abuse in America
Although Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant traces the evolution of the fictional Tull family from roughly 1925 to 1979, its theme of child abuse is particularly relevant to the 1980s, the decade in which the novel was published. The first national studies to determine the prevalence of child abuse were conducted in 1974; five years later, the federal Child abuse Prevention and Treatment Act mandated periodic National Incidence Reports. By 1984—two years after Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant...
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, originally published in the United States by Knopf in 1982, qualified as a critical and commercial success for its somewhat reclusive author, Anne Tyler. In one of her few interviews, Tyler said as quoted in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook,"I think what I was doing was saying 'Well, all right, I've joked...
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Paperback – 17 Sept. 1992 . by Anne Tyler (Author) 4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 4,879 ratings. See all formats and editions. Sorry ...
- Anne Tyler
People also ask
Is dinner at the Homesick Restaurant a good book?
What is dinner at the Homesick Restaurant about?
When did Anne Tyler write dinner at the Homesick Restaurant?
Who wrote Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant?
Does dinner at the Homesick Restaurant have an epiphany?
What are the strengths of dinner at the Homesick Restaurant?
Key Takeaway: "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" by Anne Tyler is a captivating novel that delves deep into the intricate dynamics of the Tull family. Each member of the Tull family is intricately woven into the narrative, offering a rich tapestry of characters for readers to explore. The central theme of family dynamics and relationships is ...
