Good writers often have preoccupations. Sets of characters or pieces of experience repeat themselves in book after book because an idea of life is being obsessed over. If a reader is responsive to the preoccupation, each new book deepens the tale being told. If a reader is not responsive, the writer is silently instructed: "Tell another story, you've told this one already."

Anne Tyler is a writer with a preoccupation. Writing in a time and place that is stimulated by the idea of the separately maturing self, Tyler's novels are relentlessly devoted to the idea of never growing up, never leaving home. Not only do her characters refuse to leave their parents' houses, they inevitably marry surrogate brothers or sisters whom they pull into the house as well—whereupon they become their parents without even becoming men or women. In Tyler's world there is neither terror nor rapture because there is no sex. Instead, there is an endless child-parent interchange prolonged into listless adulthood: the only refuge is in a kind of acted-out fantasy commonly referred to as making magic.

Tyler has real feeling for the condition she describes, and sympathizes keenly with her characters as they burrow back into childhood. It is this sympathy, above all, that makes her such a fine writer. Her gift for dialogue and narration is prodigious—she skillfully stitches her prose from a single, mysteriously lengthening thread into landscape, densely made, fully peopled—but it is the sympathy that allows her to achieve genuine pathos. Pathos is the dominant color in each of her novels, woven strongly through the design of her writing—warm, repetitious, predictable, somewhat like the comforting familiarity of an ironic home sampler.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is Anne Tyler's ninth novel in 18 years. The character of its prose, the quality of its invention, the inevitability of its conclusion can easily be traced to her early work—that's how stable the inner experience in Tyler's writing is. As the years pass, this experience seems to dig in, insist upon itself, and here, in The Homesick Restaurant it stands its ground, weighted and immovable, achieving a curious self-command through the integrity of its stubbornness.

Most of Tyler's novels are set in or near an unreal city called Baltimore (a cardboard backdrop; it could be Anytown, USA). On a residential street in a once-good section of town, in a shabby frame house whose foundations are settling and whose paint is peeling, there lives a family named Peck or Gower or Emory. There are many people in the family—mothers, fathers, in-laws and grandparents, aunts and uncles, children growing up, others grown and returned home—pack rats every one of them. The house is piled floor to ceiling with books, toys, furniture, clothing, objects of every size, description, and meaning; physical dishevelment alone makes life inside the house a three-ring circus.

At the same time that they collect everything in sight, Tyler families seem always to be drifting. The tension, of course, is between staying put and running off, and in every Tyler novel one character or another does run off—a traveling-salesman husband who deserts the family, a brother who leaves to become a jazz musician, a mother who elopes with an inappropriate relative. Fairs, carnivals, circuses, traveling shows abound; people endlessly try to recapture that last moment before life got hopelessly bogged down. Meanwhile, the ones who remain behind eat the most amazing amount of junk food. I know of no other novelist whose 45-year-old men and women are forever eating Fritos and Baby Ruths and drinking Yoo-hoos.

Inevitably, one of those who stay put will detach from the group, adopt a narrative voice of dazed and slightly fantastical confusion, and guide us through a 300-page Tyler happening: a picaresque chronicle of the satisfying sadnesses of family life invariably described as warm, magical, funny, and wise. (p. 40)

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is the best of Anne Tyler's novels. It is free of "magical" invention and strikingly direct in communicating the depression behind the adopted whimsy of her middle books. No longer young, but not yet free from her preoccupation of 20 years, Tyler now stares openly into the emotional arrest that is her true, her only subject.

Again Baltimore, again a family, again one who ran off and many who stayed. Pearl Tull lives on in a seedy frame house with her three children (Cody, Ezra, Jenny) after Beck, her traveling salesman husband, leaves—informing her one night that he doesn't want to be married any longer. Pearl has always been angry: now she'll be in a rage until she dies. Her children, traumatized by their need for her love, will flinch before that rage for the rest of their lives, but not one of them will walk away. Tyler makes this inability to leave seem moving and inevitable….

Anne Tyler is held spellbound before the hopeless loss of childhood her characters refuse to accept. She feels the dull pain of that lifelong desire for the normal family no one ever had, understands the psychic bondage in which people far into middle age are held. But Tyler mythicizes the inability to give up the family, and because she does her novels do not achieve depth.

A hundred years ago novelists wrote successfully about family life. A writer could take a group of people, set them down in a country house, move them about from the drawing room to the garden to the upstairs parlor for 30 years, and every time the door closed on two or three of them, pages of charged thought and feeling flowed from the writer's pen. A microcosm of self-discovery was locked up inside those framed, landscaped lives. There are, it seems to me, not many ways a contemporary novel can duplicate that action, insist successfully on that gestalt. Today, if a novel is to dive down into the experience that gives us back to ourselves its people must be up and about in the alien world, struggling to become men and women. The energy that ignites them is sexual in character, not filial.

Tyler's prose is sexually anesthetized—in fact, mass sexual coma prevails in her books—and so the energy it gives off feels fabricated. The warmth is shallow; it is nostalgia being burned, not immediate experience. Ironically, she is beloved precisely because her writing skill invests the ordinary infantilism of American family life with a tender glamour. She allows the middle-brow middle class to love itself for all its poignant insufficiency. A pity: A good writer being rewarded for making a virtue out of the fear of experience. (p. 41)