Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a 1982 novel by Anne Tyler set in Baltimore, Maryland.
The book follows the lives of three siblings: Cody, Ezra, and Jenny, and explores their experiences and recollections of growing up with their mother, Pearl, after the family is deserted by their father, Beck. The novel ends with Pearl's funeral, and a surprise occurrence.
The novel examines how siblings may share the same events yet experience them differently. E.g. Cody remembers his childhood as a harsh time. He blames himself for his father abandoning him and considers himself left to the mercy of an angry mother who favours Ezra. Meanwhile Ezra remembers his childhood fondly and creates a nostalgic family-themed restaurant.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is Anne Tyler's ninth novel. It was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1983. Anne Tyler considers it her best work.
Read more about Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant: Plot
Famous quotes containing the words dinner, homesick and/or restaurant:
“In the atom’s fizz and pop we heard possibility
uncorked. Taffeta wraps whispered on davenports.
A new planet bloomed above us; in its light
the stumps of cut pine gleamed like dinner plates.
The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot;
we could have anything we wanted.”
—Lynn Emanuel (b. 1949)
“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
—Carson McCullers (1917–1967)
“A restaurant with candles and flowers evokes more reveries than the Isle of Bali does.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)