It’salways tempting to look for general truths in literature. So where can I find such truths, it they are there to be found in fiction, about the family?

Not in Tolstoy’s famous slogan about happy and unhappy families, certainly. That one is just as (im)plausible if you reverse the adjectives. All happy families are not the same – though they are, presumably, quite a challenge for the novelist.

I like Alan Bennett’s line about every family harbouring a dark secret: that they are not like other families. But Anne Tyler, in Breakfast at the Homesick Restaurant, presents something rarely spoken of yet surely universal: that within each family there are as many different families as there are family members.

In 1928, Pearl is on the anxious brink of spinsterhood when she is swept off by Beck Tull, a travelling salesman some years her junior. With relief she hastens into marriage and soon they have a son, Cody. Much later, when she is “skidding” through the memories of her life while waiting to die in hospital in the 80s, she remembers how her variety of fierce maternal anxiety led her to think, watching her tender child tottering into the world, that she should really get “a spare”. In due course Ezra is born, followed by a sister, Jenny.

“One Sunday night in 1944”, Beck abruptly announces to Pearl that he’s leaving and, without ceremony, disappears from her life into the midwest, saying he doesn’t want to see the children after he’s gone. (Like most of Tyler’s fiction, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant remains in Baltimore.) Divorce is still a source of acute social shame, and Pearl worries what to tell the children. That he’s away on business seems like a benign fiction, which also allows her to entertain dreams that he’s somehow going to come back.

After a certain time, as she goes out to work to keep the family afloat, her mythology becomes set. The years pass, and at one point she congratulates herself on so successfully keeping the children in the dark. Or so she continues to think – even when she finally makes a determined effort to tell them, and they concertedly change the subject.

All this is told from Pearl’s point of view; the succeeding chapters are shared out between her and the minds of her children and one grandchild.

So, we move through the 20th century with Ezra, a pathologically kind and mild man who drops out of college to work in a restaurant, and remain by his mother’s side. Alongside him, Cody is consumed first with guilt over the paternal flit for which he feels responsible, and then with jealousy of a brother you’d think it hard to want to compete with, but whose girlfriend he reflexively covets, steals and marries. Jenny, meanwhile, grows up in wilful contrast to Pearl’s feminine isolation, always much happier in jeans than dresses and on the way to becoming a paediatrician.

Everybody is in the same family; everybody is in a different family. The richness of Tyler’s detailed characterisation throws up these contrasts sharply, but with an inimitable warmth. Here for instance is Ezra, looking at Jenny with her family: “She smelled of crayons and peanut butter – homely smells that warmed his heart”.

Or Cody, even as a wealthy adult still stewing over his brother: “Meanwhile, his ragged, dirty, unloved younger self, with failing grades, with a U in deportment, clenched his fists and howled, ‘Why? Why always Ezra? Why that sissy pale goody-goody Ezra?’”

Ezra’s story sees him take charge of the restaurant he works in, and change its name to the book’s title, sinking his heart into the wish to see his family finish a meal together. It doesn’t happen. That certainly struck a chord with me, as my own family almost never succeed in sitting down to eat together.

Which is not altogether surprising: it would add up to five families having a dinner party, and when was that ever going to be a straightforward undertaking? And there’s another more-or-less universal truth: the perennial botheration – particularly sharp over the Christmas period – of a family just rubbing along together.

It seems so to me, anyway, but maybe you should ask my brother.