Homer & Langley
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Average rating3
15
Ratings3
Average rating3
From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World's Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work.Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers--the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley's proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers--wars, political movements, technological advances--and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves. Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously written, this mesmerizing narrative, a free imaginative rendering of the lives of New York's fabled Collyer brothers, is a family story with the resonance of myth, an astonishing masterwork unlike any that have come before from this great writer.From the Hardcover edition.
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Doctorow has imagined the lives, thoughts and motivations behind the real figures of Homer and Langley Collyer, elderly brothers whose compulsive hoarding made national news when the brothers were found dead, one crushed by the horrendous accumulation of newspapers and debris in their New York City home, the other starved to death. Told completely from Homer's point of view, who has been blind since childhood, we learn about the brothers' lives and how they coped with their emotional and physical burdens, while also experiencing the historical progress of New York City through the early 1900s to the present.
I found Doctorow's mastery of the rhythm and flow of Homer's thoughts and observations astonishing. With a subtly comic thread running through all of Homer's narration of his life and events, Doctorow's reveals his “love” of the character of Homer, a voice that a reader can care about.
While the story left me feeling sad about the awful result of the brothers' isolation, I also think I've developed my sense of empathy a little through Homer's insights, an awareness that everyone, even strangers, have an inner life that I can never know.
I gave the book 3 stars because I didn't feel Doctorow paid as much attention to developing the other characters in the book as he did to Homer. As the story progressed into the 1960s and 70s, I also felt my interest lagging and I was less inclined to believe the storyline.
This was my first introduction to Doctorow, although his name was very familiar to me. I think I will continue to read his books and see if his sense of language and style is even more apparent and enjoyable.
