Book Review - Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow

Synopsis:  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.

First Line:  "I'm Homer, the blind brother."

Random Quote:  "So now all of that was public knowledge but what was the point except to indicate the decline of a House, the Fall of a reputable family, the shame of all that history in that it had to us, the without-issue-Collyer brothers lurking behind closed doors and coming out only at night."

Review:  The Collyer Brothers were hoarders who died in their Fifth Avenue house surrounded by their many possessions in 1947.  The first body was discovered on March 21st, Homer, dead of malnutrition, dehydration and cardiac arrest.  Langley wasn't found until April 8, crushed under a newspaper tunnel when one of his booby traps killed him.  They were the sons of a prominent family who had withdrawn into their home as the affluent neighborhood of Harlem changed around them.  After their deaths, the city removed 130 tons of garbage from their residence.

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E.L. Doctorow has re-imagined the Collyer brothers in this new novel and has taken them up through the years into modern times, using the memories of Homer to tell the story of a century.  Homer, blind and eventually deaf, and his relationship with his brother, Langley, gassed in World War I and irreparably damaged form the clear strong center of the novel.

It would be hard for me to say how much I loved this book.  It is so beautiful, so delicate, so intrinsically sad without being overwrought.  If Edward Hopper wrote a novel, he might write this one.  Doctorow handles the brothers, their relationship, and their house brilliantly.  Seen through Homer's eyes there is no illness, no hoarding, just some clutter representing the physical manifestation of his brother's Theory of Replacements.  It would have been so easy to turn this into a sensationalized tabloid version of two dirty, crazy old guys, but Doctorow never once steps over the line into caricature in this heartbreaking and beautiful novel about the worlds we leave behind.

Reading Challenges:  Historical Reading Challenge 2010, 2010 100+ Reading Challenge, 2010 Support Your Local Library Reading Challenge

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• Homer and Langley by EL Doctorow (guardian.co.uk)