Issyvoo

The appealing fantasy of a restaurant where strangers come as if to family meals is rebuked by Ezra’s own difficult family, who continually upset the meals he so painstakingly tries to arrange, and constitutes an apt metaphor for the fiction of Anne Tyler, which manages to be both comforting and gently rebuking.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant deepens into the tragedy of closeness, of familial limitations that work upon us like Greek fates and condemn us to surrender and secret fury.