Homer & Langley

Well, this book is absolutely beautiful. I am still thinking about what I want to say about Homer & Langley, while simultaneously composing a letter to E.L. Doctorow in my head. I felt this novel deeply and I am marveling at Doctorow's ability with words and language which activate the senses while creating images that linger.

More of a review to come.

Okay, so after pondering for a couple of days, here is what I have come up with:

This novel was released in 2009, but just this past fall, the trade paperback edition became available. I am aware that Homer & Langley received very mixed reviews, with readers feeling either middling about it or loving it. Like any good historical novelist pushing the limits of his craft, Doctorow takes chances. The author’s treatment of the history was a negative for some critics, while others felt the narrator was less than engaging and the imagined historical details were unconvincing, while others still, including the New York Times, opined that Doctorow "never succeeds in making the brothers’ transition from mild eccentricity to out-and-out madness understandable to the reader." Yet even the detractors gave a nod to the author’s stylistic prose.

My reaction to this novel was very strong and I felt it deeply – with my senses and my emotions. Repeatedly I found myself imagining Homer’s ability to take in so much about the world after he lost his sight. The intuition he possessed coupled with other senses being heightened made for a very evolved character with insights that helped filled in the holes of his life. Langley made for an equally interesting, though not as fully fleshed character. Because we are receiving the story from Homer, and though their relationship was unusually strong, we are never fully privy to the action inside Langley’s brain. I do wonder, however, if Langley would be self-aware enough as to categorize his behaviours as well as he categorized his newspaper articles? To me, it is a beautifully imagined brotherhood Doctorow has created; a story inspired by how Homer and Langley lived, rather than sensationalizing how they died. Certainly, many liberties were taken by Doctorow in creating this story and it seems to be this aspect of the book that has the largest share of naysayers debating the label of historical fiction being applied to Doctorow’s book. The book spans nearly 70 years, from just before WWI to the years after the Vietnam War. In this regard, many eras are referenced through the brothers lives. But, it is not so much a recounting of the unusual story of the Collyer brothers as a journey inside that story. Call it a meditation, and a metaphor.

Doctorow’s novel is absolutely beautiful, to me, and I am amazed that he could accomplish so much in such a short (the edition I have is only 208 pages) book. "I’m Homer, the blind brother." is the very first line of Homer & Langley. We know immediately, then, this story will offer a very unique perspective, while signalling, also, that the pages within contain not just a usual story. I feel the eras covered – WWI, the Great Depression, prohibition, the Korean War, The assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., the hippie movement and the Vietnam War – allowed the book to read, almost like a road trip novel with Homer and Langley benefiting from social interactions, without leaving their home. That Doctorow moved the setting of his novel from the actual home in Harlem, to an imagined Manhattan brownstone on Fifth Avenue, directly across from Central Park, likely allowed for more artistic license with the outside world coming into the brothers’ home so they could have first-hand experiences while being nearly complete shut-ins.

There is no doubt many found, and continue to find the real story of the Collyer brothers sad. If you look at photos taken from inside their home, you wonder how it is even possible they lived among all of the detritus. What Doctorow has done so well, then, is ask us to look at the tale through a different lens and dig within ourselves and extend compassion to two brothers who were likely never really understood and continue, in this world of media-provoked hoarders interest, to be viewed as bizarre and reprehensible. In Doctorow’s view, Homer & Langley are sensitive, highly-intelligent, lonely men, trying to find their purpose in the world. I think this is something we can all relate to and appreciate. ( )

I really liked this book a lot. Sorry this is so late coming, but a ton had gone on and I was out of town. When I got back I skimmed back over this book, furthering my good opinion. The thing that I liked best is you never knew what was going to happen next - I guess the randomness of the book appealed to me. The characters were exquisitely written, and it was a wonderful story. ( )

This is the first Doctorow book I've read and it blew me away. How inventive and how different. I loved the narrator's character, Homer, and that of his brother Langley, and I loved how they and their house acted as a lens for decades of U.S. and world history - from wars to changes in popular music. And such a sad and somehow sudden ending.

And she understood as I did that when you sat down and put your hands on the keys, it was not just a piano in front of you, it was a universe. (40)

On the other hand there's that song about the man and his shadow?
"Me and My Shadow."
That's the one. He's walking down the avenue with no one to talk to but his shadow. So there's the opposite problem. Can you imagine a universe like that, with only your own shadow to talk to? That is a song right out of German metaphysics. (74)

Christ, what I wouldn't give to be something other than a human being. (94)

So as I say, somehow I could never find the opportunity to sit Langley down and have him consider my despondent contribution to his Theory of Replacements. He assumed the passage of generations, you see, but my idea was lateral. If what mattered was the universal form of Dear Girl, and if each dear girl was only a particular expression of the universal, any one of them might serve equally well, and could replace another as our morally insufficient nature demanded. And if that were the case how could I ever be educated to love anyone for a lifetime? (154)

We were our bothered selves once again with the world outside contesting with us as if it had withdrawn its ambassadors. (160)

The news left him distraught - there were occasions, you see, when his cynicism broke down and the heart was made visible. (165)

Parks are dull places, I said. Of course you can get murdered here at night, I said, but other than that it is very dull. (186)

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness...My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in. (207)

( )

Doctorow reimagines the lives of two famous New York eccentrics as a way of touring the twentieth century's ups and downs. The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, inherit their parents' mansion at the far north end of Fifth Avenue, across from the park, just at the end of the (first) World War. At about the same time, Homer goes blind, and Langley returns from the war shellshocked or something like.

It's sometimes a little tiresome to watch Doctorow steering the plot to an encounter with yet another Great Historical Moment: Prohibition, gangsters, talking pictures, war after war after war, the hippies, the blackout, the moon landing. But these are all told obliquely, from Homer's point of view, and the only thing that really grates is his continual pining for—and conquest of!—women a half, a third, a quarter of his age. At least Homer himself retains the capacity to be surprised when it happens.

There were a real Homer and Langley Collyer, but except for their death—trapped inside the house by Langley's half-century of collected newspapers, possibly-repairable mechanisms, and projects and rooms abandoned to rot and rats—Doctorow invents freely. That seems to be his usual mode, but this is the first work of his I've read.

The audiobook narration is very well done; the narrator has a perfect voice, gravelly and urban without getting into stereotype, and modulates it within his range to give each character a distinct identity. There was one egregious mispronunciation (Homer's vocabulary is at a 19th-century standard), but I forget now what it was. And it was especially nice to listen to the book rather than read it in print, since it is supposed to be written by the blind Homer, sitting at his Braille typewriter inside the maze his brother has made of their house. ( )

I am a big fan of roughly half of Doctorow's work. Though this one started with a sense of greatness, ultimately it falls in line with the least favored half of his oeuvre for me. Like several others reviewers, I was disenchanted by Doctorow's blatant changes to the Collyer brothers' story. The truth has enough pathos--I don't think Doctorow needed to distort it to make his telling a captivating one. I also often had a sneaking feeling that the book had multiple small continuity slip-ups, as when the blind narrator Homer frequently describes visual scenes in abundant detail, or when now-deaf Homer mentions sounds. These issues can be rationalized a few times--maybe Langely told Homer what something looked like down to every sumptuous detail--but recurring as they do they add up.

Doctorow can be a fantastic writer, but in this one he doesn't seem to be achieving either his full potential or the potential of his story. ( )