Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [140]
“They’ve found us,” he told Beck. “Let’s go finish our dinner.”
“Oh, well, I’m not so sure,” Beck said. But he allowed himself to be helped to his feet. “Oh, well, maybe this one last course,” he said, “but I warn you, I plan to leave before that dessert wine’s poured.”
Cody held on to his elbow and led him toward the others. Overhead, seagulls drifted through a sky so clear and blue that it brought back all the outings of his boyhood—the drives, the picnics, the autumn hikes, the wildflower walks in the spring. He remembered the archery trip, and it seemed to him now that he even remembered that arrow sailing in its graceful, fluttering path. He remembered his mother’s upright form along the grasses, her hair lit gold, her small hands smoothing her bouquet while the arrow journeyed on. And high above, he seemed to recall, there had been a little brown airplane, almost motionless, droning through the sunshine like a bumblebee.
DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT
A Reader’s Guide
ANNE TYLER
A CONVERSATION WITH ANNE TYLER
Q: You’ve been known to claim Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant as the favorite of all your novels. What, in your eyes, sets it apart from the rest? What about it wins it such a special place in your heart?
A: For one thing, this book somehow managed to end up very much like the book I envisioned when I first began writing it. That almost never happens. I remember that when I’d finished, I thought, I’ve done what I wanted to. And then I’m so attached to the characters. I still miss them, even all these years later.
Q: In all of your work, you focus on the romantic and familial relationships that shape people’s lives. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, however, seems almost exclusively interested in family. What made you choose to zoom in so much on family matters, when writing this novel? Did family affairs seem more relevant to your life at the time than affairs of the heart? Which subject interests you the most?
A: I’ve often said that writing a book is like plucking an olive out of a bottle—one of those narrow bottles in which the olives are stacked in a single row. What comes next is what I write, willy-nilly. I wish I could tell you why!
As for whether family relationships or romantic relationships are more interesting: Somewhere in this book, Jenny says that marriage is like the earthquake in a disaster movie; it flings people together and exposes their true characters. I think that’s even truer of family life. Families are almost impossible to get out of, and therefore they make wonderful petri dishes for novelists.
Q: From chapter to chapter, you change narrative voice, giving the reader glimpses of several different characters’ points of view. Did you have fun doing this? Was there a particular character from whose point of view you enjoyed writing the most? Did you find yourself becoming angry at one character in one chapter and then defending him or her in the next?
A: Changing the point of view is one of my favorite parts of writing. It’s such a luxury not to be imprisoned behind a single set of eyes. And I love the challenge when I think, There’s no way on earth I could know how it feels to be so-and-so, and then I have to come up with a way. Probably one of the reasons I still feel so much affection for this book is that I enjoyed the viewpoint of each person equally, and I hadn’t expected that: Pearl, for instance—my least sympathetic character; Cody, in his continual stew of resentment; and hard-shelled Jenny. In a way, I felt that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant educated me.
Q: What authors have influenced your writing style the most? Was there one writer who influenced Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in particular?
A: My greatest lifelong influence has been Eudora Welty. This particular book, though, was influenced by Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, even though I hadn’t a hope of achieving anything like that book’s complexity.
Q: You wrote Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant