“How
pointless real life was! In novels, events led up to something,” thought Ezra,
as he scanned his mother’s diary. “What
would you say is your patients’ most common disease?” This was what Ezra later
asked of his medic sister, Jenny. “Mother-itis,” Jenny replied. Their mother,
Pearl, so central to their lives, yet so difficult a project for any of them,
passes away to be eulogised at her funeral in a manner that was “so vague, so
general, so universally applicable, that Cody thought of that parlour game
where people fill in words at random and then giggle hysterically at the story
that results.” Cody was another of Pearl’s three children, the first, in fact,
and also the most difficult. It was, of course, the children, those that
remained after their mother’s death, that were the consequences of the random
gap filling that had not even recognised their mother. And then, at the end of
Pearl’s funeral service, the minister announced the closing hymn, chosen by
Pearl herself. “We’ll Understand It All By And By.” Perhaps she did. Perhaps.
In
its quiet, essentially suburban understatement, Anne Tyler’s tale of family
life in Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant is nothing less than a masterpiece.
As ever with Anne Tyler, the family lives in Baltimore, is not rich, is not
particularly poor and presents little that is even potentially memorable. When
Pearl and Beck Tull married, they might have anticipated a shared life of
convention, an expectation that might have been on the way to fulfilment when
three children arrived and the progress of their father in his sales career
seemed assured. But then we all take far too much for granted. Beck Tull
disappeared, walked out, apparently to pursue his career via a posting that had
to take him away from Baltimore. But soon this was an independent life. The
letters home became infrequent, the fifty dollars he apologetically generously
enclosed less dependable.
Such
events might have proved earth shattering if Pearl Tull had not been such an
effective, if reluctant pragmatist. For the good of her family, apparently, she
made the best of things, created excuses, refused to accept that this was a
separation, and chose not to offer an opinion to her children. Such a change
thus becomes a different form of convention. These events are set, of course,
in the mid-twentieth century and in the United States, where such occurrences
were not unknown.
And
so Pearl was left to raise three kids. She took a job behind a store counter
and walked to work to save on fares. Cody, the eldest of the three, had always
been difficult. Ezra was meeker, milder, perhaps prone to naiveté, a quality he
never quite managed to grow out of. Jenny was perhaps the most capable, and
talented, certainly the most obviously practical of the three. She was motivated
to study, to go to medical school and become a doctor. And that is exactly what
she did. Ezra took on a restaurant, the eating house of the title, though we
are not to conclude that Jenny’s later eating disorders are a result of the
unconventional nature of the family menu. Cody became a time and motion man,
but a very successful one. He always did seem to have a desire to tell other
what they should be doing.
And
thus all three of Pearl´s children grow up. They survive because of, rather
than in spite of their mother, but the recipients of the love feel things
differently. These people live anticipatory lives, their experience of the
present dominated by a view of the future as it ought not to be. These people
are never “well”, only “pre-ill”. They are never “happy, only “pre-trauma”.
They never enter into “marriage”, only “pre-divorce”. And yet illness and
trauma only rarely visit their essentially safe lives, though perhaps
inevitably divorce is somewhat more common. As adults, they continually reinterpret
their past, without ever really either acknowledging it or knowing it.
What
happens to these characters is the important and essential content of the book,
so a review of Anne Tyler’s Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant must leave all
detail to be discovered by the reader. But eventually what happens is far less
important than how it happens. The book’s currency is the complexity of the
relationships between and amongst these family members. And these
inter-relationships, though often both predictable and dysfunctional as well as
avoidable are described by Anne Tyler in truly beautiful, economic prose via
the shared events of their fictional but illustrative lives.
But
it must be recorded that Ezra inherits a restaurant, and several of the family
encounters that form the spine of the story take place over the dinner table.
Not every dish served up is to everyone’s individual taste, but when did
individual preferences count for anything when the collective of family is so
strong? Even when superficially it might appear weak… As time passes, it
becomes clear that it might not just be the food that might be described as a
“concoction” when these family members get together.
Anne
Tyler’s genius lies in her ability to make the mundane captivating. These people
could live next door. They are not gentry, not celebrities. They are not really
achievers and, at least on the face of things, might not possess any feature
that might be described as outstanding. But then that is entirely Anne Tyler’s
point. They are ordinary people of their time but, as individuals and then
because of that collective we label “family”, they are of course unique, And
their lives consist of never-to-be-repeated attempts to solve the challenges
their unique circumstances generate. They offer no great surprises, no
significant crimes, no earth-shattering traumas, and witness no particular
history. But their lives continually change, develop, disintegrate, reform and
surprise. In Anne Tyler’s work, life itself is the plot and the family is its
landscape.
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