The book follows the lives of three siblings: Cody, Ezra, and Jenny, and explores their experiences and recollections of growing up with their mother, Pearl, after the family is deserted by their father, Beck.

Only in her third marriage to a man with six children whose wife has abandoned him does she find stability in family life and in her successful, if harried, career as a pediatrician.

Benjamin DeMott, wrote in his 1982 New York Times book review: "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a book to be settled into fully....Funny, heart-hammering, wise, it edges deep into truth that's simultaneously (and interdependently) psychological, moral and formal - deeper than many living novelists of serious reputation have penetrated, deeper than Miss Tyler herself has gone before.

But no small measure of the book's subtlety derives from its exceptional - and exceptionally wise, the word bears repeating - clarity about the uselessness of cost accounting in human areas such as these....The behavior and feelings of all three are linked somehow with the terrible, never-explained rupture: their father's disappearance....But it's also the case that what is best in each of these people, as in their mother, has its roots in the experience of deprivation that they jointly despise...We arrive at an understanding that the important lessons taught by adversity never quite make themselves known to the consciousness of the learners - remain hidden, inexpressible.

"What one wants to do on finishing such a work as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is maintain balance, keep things intact for a stretch, stay under the spell as long as feasible....We're speaking, obviously, about an extremely beautiful book.

"[3] John Updike, in his 1982 review in The New Yorker, wrote, “[Anne Tyler's] art needed only the darkening that would give her beautifully shaped sketches solidity....In her ninth novel, she has arrived at a new level of power.”[4] Margaret Manning of The Boston Globe thought that Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is "a book that should join those few that every literate person should read....You surface from this marvelous novel as if from the bends, lungs nearly bursting, tears rattling on the page.