"This is my first time to read 3 books by an author in succession: one, two, three... Just like the saying when it rains, it pours, I am having an Anne Tyler Book Festival. After reading her The Accidental Tourist I went to the bookstore and bought Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and read right away. Then last Friday, when I was winding down with the second book, I bought Breathing Lessons and I am now reading it. The whole experience is like finding a gold mine. Here is Anne Tyler who I never thought to be an author I would enjoy reading.

A couple of years back, with only 200+ read books, I was having a hard time naming my favorite contemporary female authors. Jodi Piccoult was a turn off. Jennifer Egan was a disappointment. Elizabeth Gilbert was a dud. Of course, I loved Virginia Woolf, Emilie Bronte, Muriel Sparks, Carlson McCullers, Flannery O’Brien, and Iris Murdoch but they are all dead. Let’s not talk about Emma Donaghue. The two Alices - McDemott and Munro - won my heart but not enough motivation for me to look, buy and read their other books right away.

Anne Tyler is different. She writes with so much clarity and her characters are so interesting you could almost see, feel, smell and taste them. Her settings are all in heartland USA (Baltimore, mostly) and so, reading her books feels like you are watching afternoon drama series of American families, regardless of how dysfunctional or typical they are.

I was blown over by the eccentric characters in her The Accidental Tourist but I admired how she narrated the flight of the Tull family in this book, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. The book has 3 themes and each of them is emphasized at different parts of the book:

1. The effects of a father’s abandonment of his family. Beck Tull, because of some flimsy personal reasons, abandons his family that includes his three kids, Cody, Jenny and Ezra. Underneath their life stories is the pain that they have to live through because their father just, without telling them so, stepped out of their lives at the time they needed him to be there.

2. The difficulty of the remaining parent to try to make ends meet for the family. With Beck Tull gone, Pearl Tull, the mother has to support her 3 kids. This book shows that a mother, however loving she wants to be, can be neurotic and lose her temper because of the tall responsibility of raising her kids single-handedly. Mothers are human beings and they can do wrong. However, it is up to us to understand their shortcomings. Sometimes, however, some of us may not be as understanding as our siblings.

3. The passing of time, No matter how much painful our childhood was, we are now adults and we have our own lives to live: our own wife, children and grandchildren. We tend to do to them what our parents showed us. At the end of our life’s journey, however, it all boils down to the passing of time and this theme was brilliantly encapsulated in this paragraph (let me give you a sample of Tyler’s wonderful prose):

”Everything,� his father said, “comes down to time in the end- to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it all based on minutes going by? Isn’t happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again? Even big things � even mourning a death: aren’t you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos � ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? Long-ago people smiling, a child who would be an old lady now, a cat that died, a flowering plant that’s long since withered away and the pot itself broken or misplaced� Isn’t it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.�

I am now reading her Pulitzer (1989)-award winning book Breathing Lessons and one thing that is very apparent is Tyler’s ability to make each of her book distinct and different from each other. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant has different POVs and the story is centered on a single family. The Accidental Tourist has only one POV, that of Macom Leary’s. Breathing Lessons opens with a couple who has two kids and at least judging from its opening, has a different taste compared to the first two books.

Anne Tyler (born 1941) has so far written 17 novels. I blame her for adding 14 more to my hunting-for-this folder. If only I could read two books at the same time, one book per eye/hand, I would read all her other 14 books straight without letup.
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