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| Anne Tyler |
There is a core of decency in Anne Tyler’s characters.
They are credible, and the muted drama of their inner narrative is instantly
recognizable, never mind that her stories are set in Baltimore while I read
them sitting here in Singapore.
Anne Tyler puts a fictional family under the
magnifying lens in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. What we get to see is
tragedy - familial and personal - and perseverance – of people and their
families. This is a universal theme, though probably poorly explored by
writers who are mostly concerned with individual angst, endeavour or fortuity.
The family is often shown as the circumstance around
an individual. In this novel, we also get to see the converse.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is the
story of Pearl and her three children – Cody, Ezra and Jenny. The children’s
father ups and leaves one day leaving Pearl to manage as best as she can. They
turn out all right but not quite, like all of us I guess. The story is told from
the perspectives of the main characters. Certainly, we know what they all
think, either through a personal POV narrative or through some confessional
piece of conversation. This easy comprehension of motivation and attitudes of
family members is believable; Tyler’s style is very effective.
The descriptions are fantastically
evocative – a big part of all our lives play out within the walls of our homes,
yet until the advance of the blogging generation, literary produce very rarely
concerned itself with the mundane details of home life. It either ran outdoors
or delved deep into the individual psyche, leaving Anne Tyler to spark to life ‘the
mild indoors.’ So we have ironed napkins stacked in a block, the conundrum of
whether or not to wash a plastic doily, the act of a lady smoothing out fallen
drops of water on her quilt after being helped to a few sips. We also have a
mother who rages when she comes back from work to discover the dishes not
done since morning and how the rage turns ugly. We see how this woman copes
with her life and how the children have been scarred, even debilitated to an
extent, but not damaged in a permanent way, certainly not destroyed. We see how
the children resent their mother yet look out for her, save up to buy her
presents, cannot bear to see her suffer. One has been granted a peek into others’
lives and I suppose the message is to teach us some empathy.
