Howard's End Book

The last time my eyes teared up during a movie was the opening scene for Pixar's Up in 2009. The only time I've done this with a novel is Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award which Anne Tyler considers her best work. Published in 1982, not only is there no dust on this book--which could've been released today without seeming out of touch--but no imperfections either, in particular the way Tyler connected me with her characters, their dreams and regrets without any artificial flavoring. This is storytelling at its absolute finest.

The novel begins with eighty-one year Pearl Tull refusing advice from her family doctor to be treated for possible pneumonia at a hospital. She prefers the comforts of home, where her meditative son Ezra cares for her, having lived with his mother in this rowhouse on Calvert Street in Baltimore his entire life. Pearl's mind wanders back to her youth. Small and slender, she has suitors and little intuition for why she should still be single at the age of thirty. She refuses the college education offered by her uncle, not wanting to burden him. No churchgoer, she attends a Baptist service with a friend and meets Beck Tull, a twenty-four year old salesman of farm equipment.

A dashing gentleman, Beck proposes marriage to Pearl, and after six years of moving around, the couple settle in Baltimore to start a family. Cody is a strong but competitive boy whose mean streaks grow meaner in an effort to hurt his earnest brother Ezra, who only wants to make others happy. Their younger sister Jenny is flighty but serious. Rather than form friendships with others, they stick together. The children are fourteen, eleven and nine when Beck notifies Pearl that he's accepted a job transfer and will send money. Asked if he'll want to visit, he replies, "No." Pearl determines it best not to tell the children right away that their father has left them.

She planned how she would do it; she would gather them around her on the sofa, in the lamplight, some evening after supper. "Children. Dear ones," she would say. "There's something you should know." But she wouldn't be able to continue; she might cry. It was unthinkable to cry in front of the children. Or in front of anyone. Oh, she had her pride! She was not a tranquil woman; she often lost her temper, snapped, slapped the nearest cheek, said things she later regretted--but thank the Lord, she didn't expose her tears. She wouldn't allow any tears. She was Pearl Cody Tull, who'd ridden out of Raleigh triumphant with her new husband and never looked back. Even now, even standing at the kitchen window, all alone, watching her tense and aging face, she didn't cry.

A check for fifty dollars arrives each month from Beck, sometimes with a pithy note sharing a success he's had at work. He never phones or visits. Pearl takes a job as a cashier at Sweeney Bros. Grocery and works mornings. She returns home to make supper or repairs on the house, an aptitude her children never develop. After supper, Pearl sometimes plays board games with them; Cody is a cheater, but the only one confident enough to sing and dance with mom. Pearl dotes on Ezra and holds high expectations for Jenny, but her anger is sometimes loosed physically and emotionally on the children, who figure out that their father isn't coming back.

Cody's feelings of abandonment lead him play juvenile pranks on his brother, which Ezra shrugs off like a puppy. Cody catalogs every oversight and begins feeding into a jealous narrative that Ezra is loved and he is not. He ultimately finds lucrative work as an efficiency expert, spending as much time on the road as his father. Pearl has high hopes that Ezra will become an educator, but he spends most of his time at Scarlatti's Restaurant, where Jenny learns her brother's ultimate desire is to manage the place, providing old-fashioned meals for customers who miss the comforts of home. Jenny goes to college to study medicine, meeting the first of three husbands there.

Ezra takes over Scarlatti's and announces his engagement to Ruth, a hick from Pennsylvania who works as a cook. Cody becomes obsessed with seducing her away from his brother and manages to do so, marrying her and bearing a son named Luke. Ezra, who remains cordial with his brother and sister-in-law, never shows interest in a woman again. Jenny has a daughter by her second husband but as a single mom, is as abusive toward the child as Pearl was to her. She marries a man with six kids of his own, while Ezra tries over and over to plan a nice family dinner which the Tulls can finish without someone getting their feelings hurt and leaving the table.

Pearl believes now that her family has failed. Neither of her sons is happy, and her daughter can't seem to stay married. There is no one to accept the blame for this but Pearl herself, who raised three children single-handed and did make mistakes, oh, a bushel of mistakes. Still, she sometimes has the feeling that it's simply fate, and not a matter of blame at all. She feels that everything has been assigned, has been preordained; everyone must play his role. Certainly she never intended to foster one of those good son/ bad son arrangements, but what can you do when one son is consistently good and the other is consistently bad? What can the son do, even? "Don't you see?" Cody had cried, and she had imagined, for an instant, that he was inviting her to look at his whole existence--his years of hurt and bafflement.

Often, like a child peering over the fence at somebody else's party, she gazes wistfully at other families and wonders what their secret is. They seem so close. Is it that they're more religious? Or stricter, or more lenient? Could it be the fact that they participate in sports? Read books together? Have some common hobby? Recently, she overheard a neighbor woman discussing her plans for Independence Day: her family was having a picnic. Every member--child or grownup--was cooking his or her specialty. Those who were too little to cook were in charge of paper plates.

Pearl felt such a wave of longing that her knees went weak.

I've read nearly 270 novels since joining Goodreads, including two others by Anne Tyler: The Accidental Tourist and Ladder of Years, which are both wonderful and make the concerns of fussy WASPs in Baltimore not only compelling, but relatable. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is one of the very best novels I've read. Outside of a spirited Yankee wit and simmering passion that I respond to, what makes Tyler unique is her authenticity. Her book plucked my emotions but there isn't a single note in it that's artificial. There's no more "plot" than life has a plot, and instead of moments of high drama, what Tyler does so well is fill in the spaces between the drama, the compulsion we have to understand and often end up hurting ourselves as a result.

That was the evening that Cody first got his strange notion. It came about so suddenly: they were playing Monopoly on Cody's bed, the three of them, and Cody was winning as usual and offering Luke a loan to keep going. "Oh, well, no. I guess I've lost," said Luke.

There was the briefest pause--a skipped beat. Cody looked over at Ruth, who was counting her deed cards. "He sounds just like Ezra," he told her.

She frowned at Baltic Avenue.

"Didn't you hear what he said? He said it just like Ezra."

"Really?"

"Ezra would do that," Cody told Luke. "Your Uncle Ezra. It was no fun beating him at all. He'd never take a loan and he wouldn't mortgage the least little thing, not even a railroad or the waterworks. He'd just cave right in and give up."

"Well, it's only that ... you can see that I've lost," Luke said. "It's only a matter of time."

"Sometimes you're more like Ezra's child, not mine."

"Cody Tull! What a thought," said Ruth.

But it was too late. The words hung in the air. Luke felt miserable; he had all he could do to finish the game. (He knew his father never thought much of Ezra.) And Cody though he dropped the subject, remained dissatisfied in some way. "Sit up straighter," he kept telling Luke. "Don't hunch. Sit straight. God. You look like a rabbit."

As soon as he could, Luke said good night and went to bed.

I wanted to blubber by the final page of this book out of joy for how much I related to it. It would be easy to chalk this up to being at a junction in my life where I feel I've failed more than I've succeeded, where family has passed away and holidays seem emptier than full. And yet my reaction to the book was consistent whether Tyler's characters were examining themselves at fourteen, forty or eighty, or male or female. Her fiction reveals something essential about being human, with passion, humor, disappointments and redemption stumbling everyone. Watching them recover themselves filled me with hope.