E. L. Doctorow (1931–2015)

Read: Nov 2016
Rating: 5/5 stars, best of 2016

I have always been oddly fascinated by hoarding and the mindset of people who pack their homes from floor-to-ceiling with all sorts of junk so this book has been one I have meant to read for a long time. I found it incredibly moving as well as entertaining.

The story is told from the POV of Homer, who goes blind in early adulthood. He lives with his brother Langley in their childhood home; an opulent mansion in a prestigious area of New York. Homer show more chronicles his life from childhood to roughly a week before his death.

I found Doctorow's portrayel of the real life Collyer brothers to be very sympathetic and understanding. Both brothers were highly intelligent and talented. Langley had been left deeply scarred by his experiences during World War One and was devoted to his brother. It is Langley who is the compulsive hoarder as he tries to make sense of Homer's disabilites (in later life he also began to lose his hearing) and to understand the changing world.

Towards the end of the novel we really get a sense of Homer's isolation and Langley's desperate attempts to 'reach' him as he has lost his sight and hearing. Homer comments that he can no longer hear his own footsteps and feels like a ghost, that only the touch of his brother tethers him to reality.

Homer & Langley is a suberb little novel and one I know I will read again. I have also been inspired to find out more about the real brothers and while it is clear Doctorow has changed some key facts to write the book (for example in real life the brothers died in the 1940s but in the story it is implied that their deaths happen sometime in the 1970s), the book is still a wonderful portrayal of these two brilliant eccentrics. show less

http://andalittlewine.blogspot.com/2014/01/review-andrews-brain-by-el-doctorow.h...

When I received an advanced copy of E.L. Doctorow's newest novel, Andrew's Brain from the fine folks at Random House, I was excited.

Although Doctorow's novels have been hit or miss for me (enjoyed Ragtime and The March, loved Book of Daniel, couldn't finished World's Fair), I am always on board with the prospect of unreliable narrators and stories about story-telling. And Andrew's Brain offers us a show more doozy.

Andrew is a cognitive scientist with a capacity of self-inflicted wounds. He describes himself as a haphazard scholar, an indifferent lover and a compulsive shoot-from-the-hip decision maker. His life work studying the chemical miracle that makes the brain into the mind has left him without the superhuman deductive abilities he thinks such a study should bestow.

One of the things I like most about Andrew's Brain, especially compared to Doctorow's previous work, is the smallness of the cast. No personified masses in this novel; Andrew tells his story to someone he calls "Doc," who might be a psychiatrist or a prison warden or both. Andrew tells us about his two wives, and his two rivals for those women- his first wife's new husband, and his second wife's ex-boyfriend. The story told through dialogue, it has all the self-deprecating humor of Portnoy's Complaint without the sexual sensationalism.

As a small jab at modern literature, my wife and I divide our two bookcases of 20th and 21st century fiction: on the left are the lonely men, on the right are the awesome women. Like Roth's canon, Doctorow's newest work is the interior space of a lonely man, the kaleidoscopic tale he tells himself within the privacy of his head to keep trudging on in the world. Without giving too much away, Andrew's wounds are real, his trauma is rooted in the modern age. Andrew's story is told haphazardly, the punchline sometimes proceeding the joke, the aftermath often shown to us before the decision. It is, I think, about the way we piece our lives together and make sense of ourselves, even when that should be impossible. show less

This was not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause, it was war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle. It was as if God had decreed this characterless entanglement of brainless forces as his answer to the human presumption.

William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea is, without doubt, one of the defining moments in Southern history. Doctorow picks the march up as it leaves Atlanta and cuts through Middle Georgia to Savannah, the sea, show more and then the Carolinas. The battles and the ravages of war are chronicled very realistically, and the novel has a cast of characters, both real and fictional, who cover the gamut of those affected by this bit of Civil War hell fire.

Among the most interesting are a field surgeon, a Confederate soldier masquerading as a Yankee, a freed slave girl who passes for white, a black photographer and, of course, Sherman himself. Wrede Sartorius is the field surgeon whose ice-water reactions to the war were a bit unsettling, as if he did not feel anything. His clinical interest in his patients appears to be the only interest he has, remaining as apathetic to them as individuals, as he is to others who come into his sphere. In contrast to Wrede, we have Pearl, a freed slave girl who passes for white, and shows an uncommon degree of sympathy for the distraught widow of the man who fathered her. Arly is a Confederate soldier who is awaiting execution for sleeping at his post when the Yankees come into town and cause him to be freed to fight again. His method of survival is to change uniforms and pose as a Yankee soldier, and he follows the marching troops until he meets with Calvin Harper, a free black man from Baltimore who is traveling as a photographer's assistant.

Each of these characters has a fully developed story within the story, with myriad smaller characters coming and going as the march proceeds. It was Pearl’s journey that pulled this story into a solid tale for me, as so many of the other characters came and went, serving almost as vignettes of what the war was doing to so many lives, but she remained central from the beginning to the end.

It is hard to imagine how these people survived the destruction and death around them and then managed to pick up any of the pieces and carry on with meaningful lives. Sherman was undoubtedly a brilliant general, pursuing a strategy that was designed to put an end to the war and cripple the society beyond any recovery. He did what he intended, but this novel is as much the story of the lives he touched as of his own. Interestingly, Doctorow does not paint him as hero or villain, but as a bit of both, which I suspect falls somewhere near the truth. show less

At first, I didn't know what to make of this book; for the first fifty pages or so, I felt I was being presented with a collage of history and fiction, and too many characters to make sense of the novel as a whole when it came right down to it. Without my realizing it, though, the book suddenly came together into something completely different. The collage became a tapestry, and I hated having to put the book down. In the beginning, I hadn't expected to care at any point in the novel--the show more ultra-objective style of narration had left me feeling detached; sooner than later, though, I was swept up in the way that Doctorow had woven each character's story together with the world around them.

In the end, this was an incredibly touching and humorous novel, wonderful both for its reality and an odd sort of optimism that comes out by the conclusion (at least for this reader). As a statement on history and America, as an escape, and as a piece of art, this really is a wonderful novel and a deceptively quick journey. Absolutely recommended. show less