SOURCE: "Family and Community in Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 33-44.

In the following essay, Eckard compares Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe.

At eighty-five, Pearl Tull is blind and dying. She drifts through dreams and recollections, sliding back and forth through time as she remembers the grandfather who smelled like mothballs, the aunts scented with pomade and lavender water. Pearl even recalls her cousin Bertha, who carried a bottle of crystals to ward off fainting spells. But most of all, Pearl remembers her children. She recalls Cody, her eldest, as always being a troublemaker, a "difficult baby." Ezra, her second child, was "so sweet and clumsy it could break your heart." And Jenny, "the girl," in Pearl's mind was...