A Closed Family In Anne Tyler's Dinner At The Homesick...

A Closed Family In Anne Tyler's Dinner At The Homesick...

A Closed Family:

Growth Through Suffering



The novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is one of Tyler's more complex because it involves not only the growth of the mother, Pearl Tull, but each of her children as well. Pearl must except her faults in raising her children, and her children must all face their own loneliness, jealousy, or imperfection. It is in doing this that they find connections to their family. They find growth through suffering.

"Cody Tull, the oldest child and the one most damaged by the failure of his parents' marriage he becomes an aggressive, quarrelsome efficiency expert."(Voelker 126) He feels that it his fault that Beck, the father, left. ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ..."Ezra creates and manages a restaurant that corrects the excessive closeness of his family with an atmosphere that consoles the customer while making no demands."(Volker 126) This was his idealistic home.

"Jenny, the youngest, becomes a pediatrician, a professional mother, who can avoid stifling emotional obligations."(Volker 126) She, as a child, ignores most of what's going on so that no emotional harm is done to her. Jenny exclaimed: "We made it didn't we? We did grow up. Why, the three of us turned out fine.", as if she has no regrets nor has made no mistakes. This shows how she ignores and avoided emotional conflict throughout her life.

Pearl often wondered how other families worked and why hers didn't. "At one point late in life she indulges in the signal act of idealization imagining the lives of other, 'happy' families"(Voelker 128). She always kept outsiders out of the lives of the Tulls. She did this for two reasons. The first was so no one could see their problems and the second was so her children couldn't see what they were missing.

Closed families produce people less socially and personally satisfied. For instance, the son or daughter in a family business may tell the parent what to do with the business, but their relationship problem is never really resolved. It is just

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