Dinner at the Homesick restaurant.

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I re-read the same little Penguin book that I first read in 1987. All this time I've been thinking I will re-read it. It's about a family, over time, and I am sure that the first time I read it I was full of judgments about the characters. I thought, they mustn't forgive their mother, she's awful! I thought, they mustn't forgive their father, he left them! But the writer isn't in the judgment business. She's in the business of writing families that are psychologically true. The sins of the father are visited on the children (in the form of psychological damage) and what's more, on the grandchildren, and this will happen to any of us unless we make real efforts to make sure it doesn't! And perhaps even then! I found some of the parent/child conversations, where the mother has the chance to have a meaningful talk with the child in her care but fails to connect, making silly jokes instead, unbelievably painful and frustrating. I wish sometimes, that Tyler would spell out, this is how to talk to children and this is how not to, but she doesn't comment.

Pearl is a bitter person and a bad mother, and Beck is a shallow and selfish person, and the miracle of the children is that they are any good at all. But they are. The family is a family which has absorbed its painful experiences, continues to try to function, and somehow carries on, and we care about that.

In the hands of a less ambitious writer, Pearl could have been a one-dimensional woman but Tyler follows her character right up to her old age and death, so we learn much more about her than her painful struggles as a mother.

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