Anne Tyler, [like John Cheever], has sought brightness in the ordinary, and her art has needed only the darkening that would give her beautifully sketched shapes solidity. So evenly has her imagination moved across the details of the mundane that the novels, each admirable, sink in the mind without leaving an impression of essential, compulsive subject matter—the phobia portrayed in Celestial Navigation being something of an exception. Now, in [Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant], she has arrived, I think, at a new level of power, and gives us a lucid and delightful yet complex and somber improvisation on her favorite theme, family life. Searching for Caleb is the earlier book it most resembles, in its large cast and historical reach, and even in the perky monosyllabic name assigned the central family: Peck in the first case, Tull in this. Both novels play with the topic (a mighty...