Forgiveness and Family

When Beck Tull leaves his family in Baltimore, Maryland, to go pursue a different life, his family is left in the lurch.  They did not choose for him to leave, but now they must decide how to overcome this struggle and move on with their lives.

In the book, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, the Tull family seems to be faced with adversity at every turn in their life.  First, their father and main bread winner leaves them.  Then their mother has an anger problem which she takes out on her children.  The oldest son steals his younger brother's fiance, and moves away from Baltimore.  The only daughter is married and divorced three times, and the middle son struggles to keep his restaurant afloat.  Finally, the family hardly ever sees each other, making it hard to stay a tight knit unit.  Their lives seem to revolve around struggle.

For most of the book, the struggles of the characters define who they are.  Their well being and life status orbits around how they deal with certain hardships.  When the oldest son, Cody, marries his little brother's fiance, Ruth, he realizes he must move away from his family because of his actions.  He was jealous of his brother, Ezra, and his relationship, and made it his duty to steal Ruth away from Ezra.  Ezra chose to forgive Cody though.  He didn't let it bother him, even though it did.  He let Ruth go, and moved on with his life.  Cody let his struggle define him and his life, whereas Ezra let the struggle go and chose to keep moving forward.

The dysfunctional Tull family is a fragile unit, always being ripped apart at the seams and then patched up slowly and haphazardly.  They come across many hard things in their lives, and they all deal with them differently.  In the end though, they choose one another.  Beck Tull comes back into their lives, if only for a brief moment, to offer reconciliation and calmness.  The children make it through their life with some bumps and bruises, but mostly in one piece.  They overcome their different struggles, and choose forgiveness over resentment.  They become the family they always hoped to be.