Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: Analysis of Major Characters
"Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" is a novel by Anne Tyler that delves into the complexities of family dynamics through its major characters, each marked by their unique struggles and relationships. Central to the story is Pearl Cody Tull, an elderly woman whose fading eyesight prompts introspection about her challenging role as a mother and her fraught marriage to Beck, who abandoned the family years earlier. Pearl's high expectations and inability to forge close connections deeply affect her three children: Cody, Ezra, and Jenny.
Cody, the eldest, wrestles with self-doubt and resentment, leading to destructive choices that harm his relationships, particularly with his brother Ezra. Ezra, characterized by his passivity, seeks to bridge family divides through his culinary skills at the Homesick Restaurant, but his efforts often end in disappointment. Jenny, the youngest, navigates her own emotional complexities, balancing her professional life as a pediatrician with her family's turmoil. The characters' interactions reveal a tapestry of forgiveness, longing, and unresolved grievances, culminating in poignant reflections on love and the longing for connection. Together, they illustrate the intricate balance of familial love and conflict, set against the backdrop of their shared history.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Anne Tyler
First published: 1982
Genre: Novel
Locale: Baltimore, Maryland
Plot: Family
Time: 1924–1980
Pearl Cody Tull, who is eighty-six years old, small, fair-haired, gray-eyed, and indomitable. Her insight into herself and her relationships with her long-absent husband and her three children sharpens and becomes focused as her eyesight fades to blindness. Never able to nurture close relationships, Pearl instead allowed her grim determination and high expectations to drive her husband away; as a single mother, her occasional murderous rages almost obscured her powerful love of and concern for her children. Despite an abiding sense of grievance, Pearl always longs to have the children's confidence and trust, but, especially as adults, they remain at arm's length. Their feelings for her range from near hatred through tolerance to baffled love. Pearl's only oblique acknowledgment of her approaching death is her recognition of her own shortcomings. Perception comes as she lies dying, listening for clues from her own youthful diaries read aloud by Ezra, her mind drifting through the events of her life.
Beck Tull, a salesman, Pearl's husband and the father of their three children. The young Beck, black-haired, boldly blue-eyed, and flashily handsome, rescues Pearl from spin-sterhood in a whirlwind courtship and marriage. In 1944, disappointed in his career and overwhelmed by the burden of Pearl's unspoken but fierce disappointment in him, he abandons the family, afterward maintaining a link with Pearl through the increasingly rare notes and checks he sends. Because Pearl never openly acknowledges his desertion, Beck hovers on the edge of the family's consciousness for thirty-five years until he appears (at Ezra's invitation) at Pearl's funeral. Now elderly, and still dapper if slightly sleazy, Beck is ready for reconciliation and recognition as the Tull patriarch, but his commitment lasts only through the day of the funeral, to the end of the one Tull family dinner ever to lurch to completion at the Homesick Restaurant.
Cody Tull, Pearl's eldest child, who is tall, dark-haired, and handsome. His youthful rebellious behavior and adult success as a time-study expert mask a deep-seated lack of self-confidence. The focus of his resentment is his brother Ezra, who manages to attract female admiration even though he is graceless and passive. Cody, curdled by his grievances, exacts revenge first by ensnaring and marrying Ezra's fiancée, Ruth, and last by castigating the newly returned and conciliatory Beck. In the first flush of his successful career, Cody buys a farm, dreaming of an idyllic domestic life; his hopes soured, he eventually abandons the farm, leaving Pearl and Ezra to try and shore it up against disintegration, just as they try to maintain the crumbling family.
Ezra Tull, Pearl's second son and middle child. With his pale eyes, shock of fair hair, and wide, shapeless body, Ezra appears soft; his mildness in childhood becomes a passivity in adulthood that is his main flaw but also his saving grace. Ezra simply allows life to happen to him, accepting with unthinking loyalty his mother's angry love, his mentor Mrs. Scarlatti's generosity, and even his catastrophic loss to Cody of Ruth, the only woman ever to rouse him to passion. In his revealingly named Homesick Restaurant, however, Ezra comes alive, crafting dishes to tempt his clients, pouring out his oddly maternal humanity into sturdy soups and comforting, lovingly prepared meals. Time and again, marking the milestones in the lives of his fractious family, Ezra attempts to unite and reconcile the Tulls at meals in the Homesick Restaurant's forgiving atmosphere, but he is doomed to failure. Ezra's constancy stands always in contrast to his family's restless volatility.
Jenny Tull, Pearl's third child and only daughter; she is dark-haired, dark-eyed, and intense. Jenny's thin, angular body matures into a beauty that she expends carelessly. Her becoming a pediatrician seems the natural fulfillment of her intellectual self-discipline; however, as the child most vulnerable to Pearl's alternating devotion and volcanic rages, she also displays a curious ambivalence. Sensitive like Cody, she mostly keeps her emotional distance. Also warmly accepting like Ezra, in her third marriage she tumbles content-edly into domestic muddle with her new husband, her daughter Becky, and six stepchildren, all of whose problems she treats with laughing offhandedness that masks her compassion and gratitude for people who really need her.
Ruth Spivey Tull, first Ezra's fiancée but finally Cody's wife. An unschooled, rural tomboy, Ruth is a superb country cook who meets the Tulls when she is employed as a chef at the Homesick Restaurant. Tiny, freckled, and carrot-haired, with pebbly, pale-blue eyes, young Ruth has a brisk, scrappy manner that captivates Ezra and fascinates Cody. Once overwhelmed by and married to Cody, however, Ruth subsides awkwardly into middle-class domesticity, her energy smothered by Cody's moody silences and her little body pathetically lost in unsuitable feminine clothing. As Pearl once followed Beck, Ruth follows Cody to a succession of strange towns and houses, never again able to express her scornful, independent spirit. Her sole satisfaction comes from mothering Luke, their serious, lonely son.