Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

by Anne Tyler

  A: My view of this book and its characters both is surprisingly unchanged. I still find its themes important to me. I still identify with the same characters—which is to say, with all of them.

  Q: Who is your favorite member of the Tull family? Why?

  A: Ezra, of course. I’d like to give a less predictable answer, but there you are: I love him. I have slipped him into more than one of my later novels. (A courting couple in The Amateur Marriage, for instance, go out to dinner at an unnamed restaurant and order the gizzard soup.) In the later novels, I pause to think what Ezra would be doing now and I always decide, Oh, well, I guess he’s still plugging away at the restaurant, still unmarried, still alone but basically contented. Although recently I’ve started to wonder if he isn’t the type of man who will suddenly, unexpectedly, fall in love in late middle age and have one of those blissfully happy end-of-life marriages.

  Q: Each of the Tull children, whether consciously or subconsciously, seems to spend much of his or her life trying not to make the same mistakes made by either of their parents (understandably!). In some ways, they all succeed in not turning into their parents; in others, they fail. Do you think this is usually the case? Do family traits and character flaws simply repeat themselves generation after generation—for better or for worse—or is there some room for personal development?

  A: I’m fascinated by how people’s lives either echo or repudiate their parents’ lives. In a sense, I think we’re all doomed. We can repeat our parents’ mistakes or we can bend over backwards not to repeat them and end up making mistakes of contrariness; but either way, we’re still under their influence. Of course there’s room for personal development, but I’m not a big believer in the human capacity for cataclysmic change.

  Q: A pervasive theme of the novel is one of food and nourishment. The world of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is divided into “feeders” and “nonfeeders” (as Cody calls them), as well as eaters and non-eaters. Is this true of the real world as well? What do you think a person’s attitude toward food says about his or her character?

  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.

  Q: How did you come up with the title of the book? Ezra—the archetypal “feeder”—gives birth to the idea of the Homesick Restaurant, where people can come for complete nourishment of stomach and soul. Is this an idea that particularly appeals to you? Do you think the Homesick Restaurant would be a success in the real world or not?

  A: Long ago I used to wish for a Homesick Restaurant. Or I longed for one in my neighborhood, at least, and then I invented a brand name for it. Yes, it appeals to me enormously, but I am sorry to say that it would probably go bankrupt within two years if it existed in the real world rather than in the alternate universe of “my” Baltimore.

  Q: As is the case in many of your novels, there is a strong insider/outsider dichotomy present in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Do you think any “outsiders” ever really manage to penetrate the Tull family circle, to really understand them? In many ways, it seems that they are all outsiders to each other, always feeling shut out of each other’s lives, and seldom really understanding one another’s motives and perspectives. Do you see the world as largely made up of individual outsiders, all trying to get “into” each other’s lives?

  A: That’s a wonderful question to ponder, at least on paper (only on paper!). I myself am always trying to get into others’ lives. Is everyone else trying, too? I don’t know. I have a severe allergy to people who are intrusive, who ask inappropriate questions or violate accepted boundaries. And yet here I am trying to decipher—as the most persistent secret agent would try to decipher—what it means when a woman doesn’t take her hat off to cook dinner for her children.

  Q: What is the most rewarding aspect of writing for you? Does it vary from novel to novel? Is there a particular life lesson you want your readers to get out of the Tulls’ story?

  A: It never varies: I am addicted to the sensation of living lives I would not experience in reality. As for life lessons, I don’t intend for readers to learn any lesson at all from my books. I just want them to feel—even if only for a few hours—that they too are living the lives I’m describing. That’s the best that other people’s books have given me, and it’s what I’m always hoping to pass on.

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS

  AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Beck Tull’s leaving was extremely harmful to Pearl and her children, but was it really the root of all of the family’s problems? What problems would have been the same if he had stayed? What would have been different?

  2. How does the time period in which the novel takes place influence the actions of the characters? For instance, if Pearl and Beck had separated during a time when divorce was more common and seemed like a more viable option, would things have turned out differently? Do you think Pearl would have remarried? If so, how would that have affected the children?

  3. In the inscription on Pearl’s engagement ring, Beck calls her a “Pearl among Women.” In what ways is this description apt? In some ways, Pearl seems rather oyster-like, with her three children acting as the precious pearl she must protect. Does she succeed in protecting them, or does she fail? How?

  4. How would you characterize Ezra’s role in the Tull family history? Would the family have been able to survive without him? Does his family’s need for his peacemaking skills ultimately hold him back? Does Pearl?

  5. Despite his ultra-competitive nature and his tendency to be mean to his brother, Cody can be a remarkably sympathetic character at times. What circumstances excuse, or at least explain, his behavior towards Ezra?

  6. Why does Cody steal Ezra’s fiancée? How would the lives of both brothers have been different if Cody had not married Ruth? In what ways would each of them have been better off? In what ways would each have been worse off? What, for instance, do you think would have happened to the Homesick Restaurant if Ezra had married?

  7. Throughout her mothering career, Jenny graduates from violence to humor in her method of parenting. In the beginning, we see glimpses of her beating Becky in the same way Pearl used to beat Jenny when she was a girl; later, we see Slevin accusing Jenny of “always laughing and having fun.” Does she decide that there’s no point in taking life so seriously anymore? How is her rather dramatic transition positive? How is it negative? If Pearl had had the opportunity to “shop around” for husbands, as Jenny did, do you think she too would have made a similar transition? Why or why not?

  8. The Tulls’ attitudes toward food seem to say a great deal about their respective characters: Cody manipulates his appetite in order to get what he wants (i.e., Ruth), Jenny becomes a borderline anorexic, and Ezra’s primary way of relating to others is by feeding them. What do you think a person’s attitude toward food says about his or her character? Which member of the family do you think has the healthiest relationship with food? Why?

  9. In what ways do all three of the Tull children become excellent providers? What does this common trait say about the Tulls, and about Pearl in particular?

  10. Throughout the novel, Anne Tyler writes from several different characters’ points of view. Do you think she is more sympathetic to certain characters than others in exploring their perspectives, or do you think her portrayal of each is fair? How well do the characters really understand what is going on outside the confines of their own minds? Are their self-concepts consistent with how the rest of the world perceives them? Why or why not? Which character do you think is the most self-aware?

  11. Why did Anne Tyler name the novel after Ezra’s restaurant?

  12. One of the great tragedies of Ezra’s life is his failure to get his family to actually finish a meal at his restaurant. What is it t
hat makes the completion of a family dinner at the Homesick Restaurant so important to Ezra?

  13. Upon his reappearance, Beck offers very little in the way of explanation or justification for abandoning his family. Do you think he fully understands the impact his leaving has had on the entire family? Beck concludes that everything is fine largely because of appearances—the size of the “assemblage” of family members at Pearl’s funeral—but clearly, appearances can be deceiving. Is he right in thinking that his children have turned out alright, despite his deserting them?

  14. Why does Anne Tyler set the story in Baltimore? Would the Tulls’ story have played out differently in another town or city? For instance, how would the family have fared in a small town, with a stronger sense of community? Would this have changed Pearl’s mistrust of outsiders, or merely made her guard her privacy and her home even more fiercely?

  15. Whose fault was the archery accident, really? Each of the two brothers blames himself, Pearl blames Beck, and Jenny appears to have no opinion on the subject. Can blame be assigned at all? Why is it so important to Ezra that he assume the blame for the accident, that he does not get off the hook? What is the significance of the incident?

  16. How would you describe the ending of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant? Was Pearl’s life a success? Was she a successful mother? How are the Tull children doing at the end of the book? Do you think they will continue to change, or have they all hit plateaus in their personal and emotional development? How do you see them five, ten, and fifteen years after the book ends?

  ANNE TYLER was born in Minneapolis in 1941 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s ninth novel; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters. She lives in Baltimore.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Ann Tyler’s New York Times bestseller

  The Amateur Marriage

  on sale now from Ballantine Books

  1. Common Knowledge

  Anyone in the neighborhood could tell you how Michael and Pauline first met.

  It happened on a Monday afternoon early in December of 1941. St. Cassian was its usual poky self that day—a street of narrow East Baltimore row houses, carefully kept little homes intermingled with shops no bigger than small parlors. The Golka twins, identically kerchiefed, compared cake rouges through the window of Sweda’s Drugs. Mrs. Pozniak stepped out of the hardware store with a tiny brown paper bag that jingled. Mr. Kostka’s Model-B Ford puttered past, followed by a stranger’s sleekly swishing Chrysler Airstream and then by Ernie Moskowicz on the butcher’s battered delivery bike.

  In Anton’s Grocery—a dim, cram-packed cubbyhole with an L-shaped wooden counter and shelves that reached the low ceiling—Michael’s mother wrapped two tins of peas for Mrs. Brunek. She tied them up tightly and handed them over without a smile, without a “Come back soon” or a “Nice to see you.” (Mrs. Anton had had a hard life.) One of Mrs. Brunek’s boys—Carl? Paul? Peter? they all looked so much alike—pressed his nose to the glass of the penny-candy display. A floorboard creaked near the cereals, but that was just the bones of the elderly building settling deeper into the ground.

  Michael was shelving Woodbury’s soap bars behind the longer, left-hand section of the counter. He was twenty at the time, a tall young man in ill-fitting clothes, his hair very black and cut too short, his face a shade too thin, with that dark kind of whiskers that always showed no matter how often he shaved. He was stacking the soap in a pyramid, a base of five topped by four, topped by three … although his mother had announced, more than once, that she preferred a more compact, less creative arrangement.

  Then, tinkle, tinkle! and wham! and what seemed at first glance a torrent of young women exploded through the door. They brought a gust of cold air with them and the smell of auto exhaust. “Help us!” Wanda Bryk shrilled. Her best friend, Katie Vilna, had her arm around an unfamiliar girl in a red coat, and another girl pressed a handkerchief to the red-coated girl’s right temple. “She’s been hurt! She needs first aid!” Wanda cried.

  Michael stopped his shelving. Mrs. Brunek clapped a hand to her cheek, and Carl or Paul or Peter drew in a whistle of a breath. But Mrs. Anton did not so much as blink. “Why bring her here?” she asked. “Take her to the drugstore.”

  “The drugstore’s closed,” Katie told her.

  “Closed?”

  “It says so on the door. Mr. Sweda’s joined the Coast Guard.”

  “He’s done what?”

  The girl in the red coat was very pretty, despite the trickle of blood running past one ear. She was taller than the two neighborhood girls but slender, more slightly built, with a leafy cap of dark-blond hair and an upper lip that rose in two little points so sharp they might have been drawn with a pen. Michael came out from behind the counter to take a closer look at her. “What happened?” he asked her—only her, gazing at her intently.

  “Get her a Band-Aid! Get iodine!” Wanda Bryk commanded. She had gone through grade school with Michael. She seemed to feel she could boss him around.

  The girl said, “I jumped off a streetcar.”

  Her voice was low and husky, a shock after Wanda’s thin violin notes. Her eyes were the purple-blue color of pansies. Michael swallowed.

  “A parade’s begun on Dubrowski Street,” Katie was telling the others. “All six of the Szapp boys are enlisting, haven’t you heard? And a couple of their friends besides. They’ve got this banner—‘Watch out, Japs! Here come the Szapps!’—and everyone’s seeing them off. They’ve gathered such a crowd that the traffic can’t hardly get through. So Pauline here—she was heading home from work; places are closing early—what does she do? Jumps off a speeding streetcar to join in.”

  The streetcar couldn’t have been speeding all that fast, if traffic was clogged, but nobody pointed that out. Mrs. Brunek gave a sympathetic murmur. Carl or Paul or Peter said, “Can I go, Mama? Can I? Can I go watch the parade?”

  “I just thought we should try and support our boys,” Pauline told Michael.

  He swallowed again. He said, “Well, of course.”

  “You’re not going to help our boys any knocking yourself silly,” the girl with the handkerchief said. From her tolerant tone, you could see that she and Pauline were friends, although she was less attractive—a brown-haired girl with a calm expression and eyebrows so long and level that she seemed lacking in emotion.

  “We think she hit her head against a lamppost,” Wanda said, “but nobody could be sure in all the fuss. She landed in our laps, just about, with Anna here a ways behind her. I said, ‘Jeepers! Are you okay?’ Well, somebody had to do something; we couldn’t just let her bleed to death. Don’t you people have Band-Aids?”

  “This place is not a pharmacy,” Mrs. Anton said. And then, pursuing an obvious connection, “Whatever got into Nick Sweda? He must be thirty-five if he’s a day!”

  Michael, meanwhile, had turned away from Pauline to join his mother behind the counter—the shorter, end section of the counter where the cash register stood. He bent down, briefly disappeared, and emerged with a cigar box. “Bandages,” he explained.

  Not Band-Aids, but old-fashioned cotton batting rolled in dark-blue tissue the exact shade of Pauline’s eyes, and a spool of white adhesive tape, and an oxblood-colored bottle of iodine. Wanda stepped forward to take them; but no, Michael unrolled the cotton himself and tore a wad from one corner. He soaked the wad with iodine and came back to stand in front of Pauline. “Let me see,” he said.

  There was a reverent, alert silence, as if everyone understood that this moment was significant—even the girl with the handkerchief, the one Wanda had called Anna, although Anna could not have known that Michael Anton was ordinarily the most reserved boy in the parish. She removed the handkerchief from Pauline’s temple. Michael pried away
a petal of Pauline’s hair and started dabbing with the cotton wad. Pauline held very still.

  The wound, it seemed, was a two-inch red line, long but not deep, already closing. “Ah,” Mrs. Brunek said. “No need for stitches.”

  “We can’t be sure of that!” Wanda cried, unwilling to let go of the drama.

  But Michael said, “She’ll be fine,” and he tore off a new wad of cotton. He plastered it to Pauline’s temple with a crisscross of adhesive tape.

  Now she looked like a fight victim in a comic strip. As if she knew that, she laughed. It turned out she had a dimple in each cheek. “Thanks very much,” she told him. “Come and watch the parade with us.”

  He said, “All right.”

  Just that easily.

  “Can I come too?” the Brunek boy asked. “Can I, Mama? Please?”

  Mrs. Brunek said, “Ssh.”

  “But who will help with the store?” Mrs. Anton asked Michael.

  As if he hadn’t heard her, he turned to take his jacket from the coat tree in the corner. It was a schoolboy kind of jacket—a big, rough plaid in shades of gray and charcoal. He shrugged himself into it, leaving it unbuttoned. “Ready?” he asked the girls.