Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

This book is definitely well-written and drew me in. But I did not enjoy reading it, mostly because the characters were all so unlikeable. There wasn't one character among this conflicted family that I thought, aha, this is the person I can latch on to. The readability kept me going, and I also was kind of holding on to hope that someone would make a turnaround, but in general, just bleh.

My first Anne Tyler book, which I read in about 1980. She has been one of my favorite authors ever since. I picked up all of her prior books and read them, and now I make it a point to read all her new books as they are published.

Mother raising three kids on her own.

I started out writing that I thought Anne Tyler was an under-appreciated writer, and then I remember that she won a Pulitzer, so perhaps that's not exactly the correct term.

I think people don't realize the skill it takes to write her novels. While I haven't read all her work, the common thread, for me, is that she writes about ordinary people in ordinary situations. She doesn't write Jodi Picoult novels - these are the “headline-of-the-month” type stories; they also aren't thrillers, or mysteries, or any of those other types of books that sell a bajilion copies. This is just an ordinary family, doing ordinary things, with ordinary conflicts and troubles. And somehow in Tyler's hands, their story becomes utterly fascinating. She has a way of taking characters that are not the most likable - sometimes even pretty distasteful - and teasing out the bit of humanity that allows her readers to sympathize with even the hardest cases.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant isn't really about anything - and yet somehow, it's about everything. Recommended.

Matt just finished listening to the audio of The Girl on the Train (which I have not read). He described it as “full of horrible people who can't stop meddling in other people's business.”

In return, I described Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant to him as “full of semi-horrible people who are all related to each other and keep doing horrible things to intentionally hurt each other.”

That pretty much sums it up...

I was about to give up on this book at about the half way mark as it was just trudging along, but I suddenly started to connect with the characters and liked the second half well enough. All over, it is probably my least favorite of Anne Tyler's works.