dinner at the homesick restaurant by anne tyler

As an adult, he suffers from obscure guilt and believes that everyone is out to cheat him.Įzra, on the other hand, is a dreamy, nurturing kind of person. He maintains a likable facade with other people, but with Ezra, he's just downright mean. Cody, the oldest, is a greedy and spiteful boy who delights in torturing his younger brother. The three children could not be more different. When she finally did get around to telling them, they had, of course, already figured it out and hardly even responded to her big announcement. She pretended - for years! - that he was just on another business trip. Their mother refused to tell them they had been deserted.

Her memories take her back to the time, some 30 years before, when her husband, Beck Tull, deserted her, leaving her to raise their three children on her own.īeck was a traveling salesman and his children were used to him being away from home, so none of them noticed any difference at first. She struggles to tell Ezra, her favorite son, that he should have had an alternate mother, but she is unable to form the words. Caught between life and death, she is beset by memories and by regrets. We meet the family initially as its irascible matriarch, Pearl Tull, lies dying at age 85. In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy famously wrote that 'Happy families are all alike every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' All of Anne Tyler's families are different and that is certainly true of the Tull family that we meet in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

Dinner at the homesick restaurant by anne tyler