In the following excerpt, Gibson suggests that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant contains Tyler's most complex treatment of the idea that one's fate may be determined by one's family situation.
A careful reading of Tyler's recent work suggests a philosophical coherence and depth residing in aptly chosen domestic details. Like many writers, southern and otherwise, Tyler is obsessed with family, but this obsession does not fall into the familiar pattern of nature versus nurture, of maturity forged out of or against familial influences. Instead, for Tyler the familial becomes the metaphysical. Family is seen in the light of cosmic necessity, as the inevitable precondition of human choice. As Updike perceptively says of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, "genetic comedy... deepens into the tragedy of closeness, of familial limitations that work upon us like Greek fates.....
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