Book Review               

Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant
by Ann Tyler
                                                               Review by Henry Magram

Optimism in Spite of Parents Who Disappoint
    Cody and Ezra Tull are two brothers with a mother you may recognize. Their mother is lonely. Her
response to her lonely situation is bitterness: she has been angry at everyone since their father abandoned the
family. She favors one brother over the other, Ezra over Cody.
    The shattering unfairness of this favoritism never leaves brother Cody’s heart. In a catalogue of grudges, Cody sustains terrible thoughts about his childhood. Later, in young adulthood, his successes in finance and in marriage stoke his desperate drive to compete with and hurt his brother Ezra. Ezra, meanwhile, sacrifices independence and spends years parenting mom; poignantly, Ezra longs to recreate the family childhood in an idyllic version.
    This is not a desperately unhappy family of nightmares. No, it is merely a familiar American scenario. These two brothers exist in Ann Tyler’s fictional Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Like millions of contemporary American siblings, Cody and Ezra emerge into adulthood after sharing childhood in a fatherless family. No one in the family emerges as victorious or saintly or all-rescuing at The Homesick Restaurant, yet this book is profoundly optimistic because it closes on a note of stability. The siblings gradually mature into young adults, gradually forgive the angers of their childhood, and gradually come to terms with their place in the flow of life. Try the book; it may encourage you to try forgiveness in your own family scenario.

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