Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
It occurs to me that I complain about a lot of books. I have nothing to complain about with respect to Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant except that I won’t remember it six months from now. These aimless, sad books do nothing for me. There’s not enough plot to remember and the sadness drags me down without teaching me anything. You think of Les Miserables or A Tale of Two Cities. Those books are more than sad; they’re “miserables”. But they’re also triumphant. They show human nature at both its worst and its best.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant shows human nature at its average. Talk to anyone in any restaurant and they’ve got a tale about as tragic or as heroic or as illuminating as this one. I guess I need more than “slice of life” out of my literature. Once the slice is on the slide, magnify it somehow. Show me something. Make me remember.