Have you ever thought about how someone else has different views about situations than you do? In the book Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, she includes the different ways each of Pearl Tull’s children view their life after their father leaves their mother. Pearl Tull is a mother of three kids who has slowly been losing her eyesight in her old age. She is on her deathbed as she recollects her memories from when she was a middle-aged women raising her children on her own after her husband, Beck, leaves her. The kids all get together when their mother is in the hospital dying and reminisce on a few situations that their family encountered. At the end of the book, they attend their mother’s funeral and later eat at The Homesick …show more content…
Restaurant with their father Beck, who they have not seen in years. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is well thought-out and gives readers insight on how families can view the same situations in their lives differently. The main theme of this book is family. The whole book revolves around how the Tull family lives their life up until Pearl Tull is hospitalized and slowly dying of old age. This book is filled with all kinds of different everyday situations families encounter. Pearl’s husband leaves her when their three children are still young. Pearl is always working very hard to keep her children fed and take care of the house. “She’d make supper from tins she’d brought home, nothing fancy. She would listen to the radio while she washed dishes.” (15) Pearl had a very routined life with not much excitement. She would get upset with her children often because they did not do much around the house to help her. The family went through many hardships together including their father leaving and their mother losing her eyesight in old age. The author made this book very emotional by providing details of what the characters are feeling. Anne Tyler did a nice job of pulling readers into the story so that they too could understand what the characters are going through. All of the main characters developed greatly by the end of this book.
This whole book contained stories from when the Tull family was young to when Pearl died and the children had kids of their own. Pearl started out in the book as a 30 year old woman who was married to Beck Tull, a young salesman who moved his family to many different places for his job. They had three children together, Cody, Ezra, and Jenny. Beck left his family when his children were still young to be able to travel more for his job. Pearl had to learn to raise three children on her own while also working everyday because they did not live in affluence. She became very bitter and often verbally abused her kids. Cody was the oldest son who was known for getting into trouble. He loved winning, so would cheat when he played games with his family and friends. He was jealous of his brother and his mother’s relationship because they were very close. Cody was always messing with his brother and stealing his items to make him mad because he felt enmity towards him. Once they grew up, his brother, Ezra, had fallen in love with a girl but Cody was jealous so he stole the girl and married her instead. Ezra was the capricious middle child, also his mother’s favorite. He was clumsy and quite an awkward child. His favorite thing to do was play songs on his whistle and mind his own business by eschewing his peers. He started working at a restaurant when he grew up until the owner passed it down to him. He later renamed that restaurant The Homesick Restaurant. Jenny was tenuous, the youngest child, and also the only girl. Her mother picked on her a lot because she would not help with cooking or cleaning like she was supposed to. She always got good grades and spent her time studying. Jenny grew up and remarried three times, then ended up with a man who had six kids. This family changed quite a bit throughout this book by the time their mother was hospitalized when she was 80. Ezra stayed with Pearl in the
hospital for many days before she requested for him to call Cody and Jenny to be there as well. “She was dwelling on the thoughts of Cody and Jenny; it would be nice to have all her children together.” (30) The whole family had not all been together for many years, so it was a big deal for her. Jenny ended up coming but Cody never showed up until Pearl’s funeral. The title of this book has a very significant meaning that the reader does not realize until the end of the book. Ezra worked at a restaurant owned by a woman named Mrs. Scarlatti for many years. She ended up passing down the restaurant to Ezra when she was not well enough to keep it running on her own. He renamed it The Homesick Restaurant and served meals that would make people feel at home. “Ezra’s going to have him a place where people come just like to a family dinner… really homelike.” (75) Ezra’s friend Josiah was telling Jenny about Ezra’s plan for the restaurant and Jenny, at first, thought it was silly. When Pearl died, Ezra, his siblings, and even his father Beck attended the funeral and then had dinner at Ezra’s restaurant. “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant! Everyone in the family!” (287) Ezra loved having his whole family eat at his restaurant; although usually, his father did not attend. All the kids did not know what to talk about because they had not been around Beck since they were young. Eating at Ezra’s restaurant together gave them time to catch up and be with each other for a little while. Beck explained to them why he left and never came back to visit. He said he felt tied down to his family and did not enjoy dragging them around wherever he went for work. For this reason, he left his family to have more freedom and so his kids could grow up with a normal life of not moving. This gave his children closure and they understood why he did what he did. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is organized very nicely. The ending came together and had a great closing to the story. The author did a nice job of including details about the characters, but at times it seemed as though there were unnecessary details of situations. It started to drag on a bit towards the middle because many of the chapters were just the same stories repeated by different characters. Anne Tyler could have added more to the end of the book about Beck and how the kids felt about him. The book Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was structured well which made it quite simple to understand and follow.
In the book the main characters are Jay Berry, Daisy, Rowdy, Grandpa, and the monkeys. The secondary characters are Ma, Pa, Grandma, and Sally Goodin. The beginning started with Jay telling about how his family moved to the Cherokee hills. The book ended with Jay giving his money to Daisy to fix her leg. In the end he ended up getting his pony and twenty-two as well. Money was a problem for Daisy up until the end of the book. There
involved troubling situations. Look at how she grew up. The book starts off during a time of Jim
The author Thomas S. Spadley is Lynn’s father. He is the one that was with them all the time and saw all that his wife Louise tried for their daughter to understand them. The greatest qualification for him to write this book is that he is Lynn’s father. A father’s perspective is great throughout this book, as the reader I can see the intensity of what the family is going through. Since he is a math professor, and does not have a lot of knowledge in English and time, through the whole book he skips around with what they did and when. Later, on in the book that James P. Spradely, Lynn’s uncle also got involved and helped write the book.
The characters in this story are some very interesting people. They each lead their own way of life, and have their own interests at heart. Some of the main characters in this novel are: Sarny, Lucy, Miss Laura, Bartlett, Stanley, and Sarny's two children Little Delie, and Tyler. Sarny is the central character in this book. She is clever and knows exactly what to even in the worst of times. She is very emotional though, and can break down and cry when the slightest of things happens. This is perhaps from what she has experienced as a slave earlier on in her life. Sarny is fond of teaching people, as a friend named Nightjohn once taught her. Lucy is Sarny's close friend. She is also quite wise, but is a bit too optimistic at times. She never stops smiling and is very friendly. However, she does help Sarny find her lost children. Miss Laura is a middle-aged woman who lives a very luxurious life. She gives Sarny and Lucy a place to live and offers them employment. She also finds Sarny's children for her. Bartlett works for Miss Laura as well. He is a quiet and patient man who is helpful and quite kind. He was however castrated as a young slave boy, and cannot have children. Stanley is Sarny's second husband, for her first died from being worked to death on the plantation. Stanley is a gentle, big, fun-loving man, but is not intimidated by anything. This leads him to his death when he gets mad at a white man, and is confronted by the Ku Klux Klan. Little Delie and Tyler are Sarny's lost children. After she recovers them, and they grow up, Little Delie starts to like business, while Tyler wants to become a doctor.
Further, throughout the book, Sadie and Bessie continuously reminds the reader of the strong influence family life had on their entire lives. Their father and mother were college educated and their father was the first black Episcopal priest and vice principal at St. Augustine Co...
...e on her part. Throughout the story, the Mother is portrayed as the dominant figure, which resembled the amount of say that the father and children had on matters. Together, the Father, James, and David strived to maintain equality by helping with the chickens and taking care of Scott; however, despite the effort that they had put in, the Mother refused to be persuaded that Scott was of any value and therefore she felt that selling him would be most beneficial. The Mother’s persona is unsympathetic as she lacks respect and a heart towards her family members. Since the Mother never showed equality, her character had unraveled into the creation of a negative atmosphere in which her family is now cemented in. For the Father, David and James, it is only now the memories of Scott that will hold their bond together.
The story follows three girls- Jeanette, the oldest in the pack, Claudette, the narrator and middle child, and the youngest, Mirabella- as they go through the various stages of becoming civilized people. Each girl is an example of the different reactions to being placed in an unfamiliar environment and retrained. Jeanette adapts quickly, becoming the first in the pack to assimilate to the new way of life. She accepts her education and rejects her previous life with few relapses. Claudette understands the education being presented to her but resists adapting fully, her hatred turning into apathy as she quietly accepts her fate. Mirabella either does not comprehend her education, or fully ignores it, as she continually breaks the rules and boundaries set around her, eventually resulting in her removal from the school.
The story is a realistic story about the Hoods and the Willams. Both of these families were affluent families that lived in New Canaan. The book centers around Wendy and the events that take place during the their thanksgiving in the 70s. The story is pretty simple and is about family strife. Wendy is a typical adolescent exploring her sexuality. At the same time her parents, Ben and Elena are having marital differences. Ben is cheating on his wife with Janey, the wife of his close friend Jim. The irony comes up with Wendy who is has sexual relations with Janey and Jim's son Mikey and his younger brother Sandy. Wendy's older brother Paul who goes to boarding school returns home and is sexual inexperienced he desires to be with a girl named Libbets. The story centers around a key party that both the Hood's and Willams' attend. The highlight of the key party is where people place their keys into a jar and people pick up the keys of different people to have sex with the owner of the keys. At this party Ben expects to have sex with Janey, but instead Janey blows him off and has sex with someone else. This night Elena also finds out about the affair and has an affair with Jim, Janey's wife. Now while both of the parents are away Mikey wants to see Wendy, but instead Wendy fools around with Sandy. Mikey ends up wandering during the ice storm to get electrocuted by a live wire. At the same time Paul is with Libbets drinking and taking drugs. All of this is happening simultaneously on one fortuitous night.
Sociology relates to this novel in so many different ways. The family in the story, Flowers in the Attic, written by V.C. Andrews, starts off as a family of procreation, a family established through marriage, which includes the mother (Mrs. Dollanger), the father (Mr. Dollanger), and the four children: Cathy (the oldest daughter), Chris (the second oldest son), Carrie and Corey (the young twins). A conflict begins when the father dies in a car wreck, so the mother and her four children must move in her rich parents estate because they have no money and nowhere to stay. After the father's death, the norms of the children changed. The norms of the children were to stay hidden in the basement by them selves because Mrs. Dollanger may only earn back the right to inherit her father's estate by falsifying that she has no children by her husband who was also her half-uncle. The original agreement was that they can leave the basement when their grandfather dies. The rules of the house were given by the dying grandfather that stated if Mrs. Dollanger was found to have children that she would be disinherited again.
The thought of her brothers still being in her former home environment in Maine hurt her. She tried to think of a way to get at least one of her brothers, the sickly one, to come and be with her. She knew that her extended family was financially able to take in another child, and if she showed responsibility, there would be no problem (Wilson, 40). She found a vacant store, furnished it, and turned it into a school for children (Thinkquest, 5). At the age of seventeen, her grandmother sent her a correspondence, and requested her to come back to Boston with her brother (Thinkquest, 6).
The article published in the Journal of Marriage and Family titled Mothers’ Differentiation and Depressive Symptoms Among Adult Children attributes many of the traits of Darl and Jewel to their mother’s unequal treatment of them. The article suggest both boys suffer extreme long-term negative effects. Jewel suffers from an inability to form relationships and depression, while Darl suffers from a need to feel special and a severe sibling rivalry. The effects of Addie’s unequal treatment of the boys plays a pivotal role in the plot of the novel.
Her parents meet at a social gathering in town and where married shortly thereafter. Marie’s name was chosen by her grandmother and mother, “because they loved to read the list was quite long with much debate over each name.” If she was a boy her name would have been Francis, so she is very happy to have born a girl. Marie’s great uncle was a physician and delivered her in the local hospital. Her mother, was a housewife, as was the norm in those days and her father ran his own business. Her mother was very close with her parents, two brothers, and two sisters. When her grandmother was diagnosed with asthma the family had to move. In those days a warm and dry climate was recommended, Arizona was the chosen state. Because her grandma could never quite leave home, KY, the family made many trips between the states. These trips back and forth dominated Marie’s childhood with her uncles and aunts being her childhood playmates.
At the near beginning of the novel, Cory and Carrie are both five years old, and know almost nothing of the world but their family and play. This is illustrated on page 14 when Carrie and Cory play in mud after being cleaned and dressed for a birthday party, and complain to Catherine about having to take another bath. They tell her, “One bath a day is enough!...We’re already clean! Stop! We don’t like soap! We don’t like hair washing! Don’t you do that to us again, Cathy, or we’ll tell Momma!”. Throughout the book, Cory and Carrie suffer abusive acts from their grandmother, such as when they are threatened by their grandmother to be whipped if they disobey her (p. 92), are starved for two weeks to the point where they had to drink their sibling’s blood for sustenance (p. 251), and are poisoned with arsenic for months (p. 396-397). Catherine was always a mother for them, she cared for them when they were sick (p. 362-363) and told them stories to calm them down (p. 172-173), and Christopher was always a father for them, ushering them to eat healthy food they didn’t want (p. 167) and trying his best to give them what they wanted and what they needed (p. 281-282). Through their older siblings they were able to make it through the three years they had been abused and locked away in an attic like rats, and were kept from suffering trauma afterwards because of it. Near the end of the book, it is described how they played together, in a joyous way that it would seem no one who suffered what they did could, “...Cory was plucking a tune on banjo...as Carrie chanted simple lyrics he’d composed...And I sang to him that special, wistful song that belonged to Dorothy in the movie The Wizard Of Oz, - a movie that the twins adored every time they saw it…The look on Cory’s face as he
It is untidy, grimy and cluttered with items. The children gradually learn to make the situation work and make the attic their garden to enjoy, for the sake of their younger siblings, Carrie and Cory. The aspect of setting in this novel is very affective and interesting because it shows readers the viewpoint of the children and actually makes readers feel as if they are in the attic and experiencing the hurt and suffering that the characters are facing in their teen years.
In my podcast I talk about the restaurant the “O”. I discuss the experience of