'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 girl to his competitive brother Cody, stays with Pearl and runs his Baltimore restaurant like a home, where guests are offered, not what they ask for, but what's good for them. Cody, though he travels farthest from home, is the most locked in rivalry with his vanished father and passive brother; like Iago, he wants revenge on people who are 'just naturally nicer' than he is. Jenny (the least interesting) acquires, as consolation, a warm extended family.

'How plotless real life was!' Ezra says. But, though a random, scatty air is maintained, the novel is almost too neatly ordered, like Pearl's bureau drawers. The dinner that Ezra has throughout been trying to give his family finally takes place, suggesting that 'family life' is inescapable, even life-giving. The flaws, though, aren't fatal: this is a vigorous, funny, original novel.