Dysfunctional) Family Is the Most

¶ … Dysfunctional) Family Family is the most important thing.' When people recite this cliche, they usually mean that the family structure, with a stable mother and father should be a haven from the stresses of the world. However, the families of Anne Tyler's novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha, and Nino Ricci's Lives of the Saints demonstrate the failure of father and mother figures to provide such an environment, either because of willful neglect or unfortunate circumstances.

Because of a lacking or dysfunctional family structure, the children of the Tyler and Doyle novels become mired in loneliness and isolation, but Ricci's young protagonist, because he demonstrates a willingness to remember his past, rather than seeks to emotionally isolate himself from his personal history, emerges as a resilient narrator, despite his upbringing. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Cody, Ezra, and Jenny are abandoned by their father and raised by a difficult mother, Pearl.

Pearl finds it difficult to emotionally cope with her husband's abandonment, because of the financial stresses of her circumstances and the fact that she has no real friends or family members willing to help her survive. Her children grow up to become functional members of society, vocationally, but their family lives are fraught with difficulties. Even as Pearl lies on her deathbed, the family has difficulties communicating. Ezra, the most optimistic son, tries to give his mother and his siblings comfort, but to little avail.

The novel ends not with Ezra, but with Cody, the most bitter of the three children, and even Ezra's optimism and determination to please others with food and good cheer at the title restaurant seems, eventually like a coping mechanism rather than real sentiment. Ezra tries to use self-sacrifice and ignoring sorrow as a means of dealing with his problems, as Cody uses anger and their sister Jenny uses flippancy and hides behind a superficial mask, burying herself in her career and social climbing.

The three children are able make it through the last dinner as a result of these different and often clashing coping mechanisms, but these emotional refuges do not provide real emotional sustenance or the foundation for starting a family of their own. Anne Tyler's book is a compelling portrait of the inescapability of the past in the present, as the past fathers and mothers (or does not) the adult.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle likewise shows a dysfunctional family that creates difficulties for the child later on in terms of his relationships with others. The Irish boy Paddy Clark is depicted as so desperate for a sense of control over his life that he stays up night after night as he is convinced that if he stays awake his parents will not fight.

This desperate optimism, unlike Ezra's, demands concrete results, rather than shows faith or trust in the future and ultimately fails to sustain the boy. When this fantasy about the power of his will to control his parents proves ineffective, Paddy instead tries to make himself not care about anything, much like Jenny, and reacts with rage when he feels forced to care like Cody.

Paddy Clark is raised in a home atmosphere of anger and violence in and he reacts against the world in a similar manner, lashing out even in his 'fun' against the people of his town. Only through violence and rejection, he has learned, can one gain the upper hand in power relationships with others -- and also violence provides a way of alienating himself from others, as Paddy fears caring about other people too much because of the lessons he has unintentionally been taught by his family.

Despite the love he evidently feels for his parents, because of his failed vigils to keep them together, eventually Paddy says that he wants to look at his father and feel nothing, and says that his brutal fights with other boys in the neighborhood are the most important things in his life, more than family relationships.

Denied fulfillment and acceptance at home, even though his innate instinct is to love his parents, this instinct is ripped out of the boy by the circumstances of his life, and like Pearl's children, he tries to forget and emotionally deaden himself. Nino Ricci's Lives of the Saints presents a warmer vision of family life than Tyler's or Doyle's, although it is characterized by absence as well, namely the absence of the Italian woman Christian's husband, an American who has left the Italian village where her son is growing up.

The narrator mother is ostracized by the village because she has taken a lover, a kind of perverse Christian martyrdom exemplified in her choice of a stable for a tryst. It is the place where their son is conceived, like the place where Jesus was born. Because of the reaction of the villagers to his mother, early on the boy Vittoro learns the dangers of love, although he does not react against the world as stridently as Paddy or with the same isolating bitterness as Cody.

Transgressing the norms of the community, like.