'Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant' is redeemed by its singularity from being yet another three-generation 'Depression to Post-Vietnam' American family saga. True, its coy title smacks of Carson McCullers ('Ballad of the Sad Café'), and the structure—a section for each member of the family, beginning with the ailing, reminiscing mother ('Dying, you don't get to see how it all turns out')—owes something to Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying.' But the writing, like the restaurant's cooking, is deliciously idiosyncratic, enough to make one wish that Anne Tyler were better known over here [in England].

Beck Tull, travelling salesman, runs away from his oppressive wife Pearl, who leads a 'stunted' life, terrorising her three children, 'always wearing her hat when out walking, keeping her doors tightly shut when at home.' The three respond differently to this travesty of 'home.' Saintlike Ezra gives up his...