Radio review: Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: the genius of Anne Tyler; Don’t Log Off

‘I don’t understand him and never will,’ says Pearl, the pivotal character in Anne Tyler’s 1982 novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. She’s talking about her husband, but could be saying something much bigger, larger, more meaningful. That’s the charm (and effortless skill) of Tyler’s writing. She appears to be drawing very mundane portraits of family life — angry wives, feckless husbands and troublesome teenagers. The kind of lives lived behind respectable but not very interesting front doors. What can such ordinary-seeming people possibly tell us about deeper truths? Yet Tyler convinces us it’s in those unachieved and often rather dull characters that real life resides. This is so reassuring.

Radio 4’s new dramatisation of Tyler’s book by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (and directed by David Hunter) draws us in straightway. We know from the start that Pearl’s marriage to Beck, a travelling salesman, is doomed, not from anything overtly stated but by the things left out.