Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: Anne Tyler and the Faulkner Connection

Abstract

The structure of Anne Tyler's novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is interestingly reminiscent of that of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying; an investigation of the similarities reveals an underlying connection between the two works, a common concern with family dynamics and destinies. Both novelists examine the bonds between people, mysterious bonds beyond or beneath articulation. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is not, however, a pale imitation or a contemporary retelling of the Bundren novel. It is a participant in a tradition. The parallels between the two novels are suggestive rather than exact. Despite a certain sharing of Faulkner's fatalism, Tyler gives us characters a bit less passive and events a bit less inexorable. The echoes from Faulkner deepen and intensify the themes of Tyler, but in her novel, for one character at least, obsession ultimately gives way to perspective. The ending is not Faulknerian but Tyler's own; the optimism is limited but unmistakeable.