Homer and Langley

by E.L. Doctorow. Random House, 208 pp.

It's always a joy to be reminded why one of your favorite writers is one of your favorite writers. I pretty much whipped through all of E.L. Doctorow's work in a two year period about a decade ago, returning to him only for The March in 2005. Mr. Doctorow is obsessed with history and is always mining it for his inspiration: but with Homer and Langley he gleefully abuses the facts of history to create a work that is at once both historical and mythic. In doing so he has written a heartbreaking and evocative work that has officially become one of my new favorite books.



Inspired by the history of Homey and Langley Collyer, a pair of reclusive brothers who gained notoriety in the 1940s, Mr. Doctorow reinvents their lives by placing them against the backdrop of the 20th century. Rather then end in the 1940s, Mr. Doctorow's quasi-fictional characters live on until the 1970s, hiding away from the world inside a house across the street from Central Park and earning the wrath of neighbors, city councillors, the gentleman at the Dime Savings Bank and the good folks at the Consolidated Edison Company (they never paid their bills). In doing this, Mr. Doctorow has changed them from a pair of recluses into inversions of Odysseus: they manage to take part in an odyssey through the 20th century even though they rarely leave the house.  

Narrated by Homer, the blind brother, the novel spans a great deal of time in very few pages, taking the brothers from World War I (where Langley is gassed) through the 1920s and right into the postwar era. Langley Collyer devotes his time to pathological hording while Homer plays the piano, manages the occasional affair (well, two) and endures his brother's bizarre philosophies. One picture from the actual Collyer house is all it takes to show how the brothers lived:

From the actual Collyer house

The death of the Collyer brothers is the most famous part of their story - they were obsessive pack rats who were found buried beneath their things - and perhaps for this reason it doesn't interest Mr. Doctorow at all. His focus is the way Homer and Langley lived and, more importantly, the strange and touching relationship between two eccentric brothers. In fact, in appropriating Homer Collyer's voice, Mr. Doctorow succeeds in making their lives seem somehow uneccentric, despite being recluses who live amongst stacks of newspapers and have a Model T Ford sitting in the middle of their living room. As seen by Homer Collyer, it is the world that doesn't make sense and if anything, we come to marvel how it is that more people don't lock themselves away.

Mr. Doctorow's style is, as always, both evocative while remaining simple. As the book takes the form of Homer Collyer's memoirs, Mr. Doctorow wisely writes with the knowledge that the voice he has taken on is unreliable. It is questionable how many of the characters Homer discusses actually existed or if they did, how much they resembled the portrait Homer paints of them. It is possible, we realize towards the end, that everything Homer has told us has been an abuse of history - something all too similar to the abuses Mr. Doctorow has committed in re-arranging the facts of their lives. Thus the novel, much like the its characters, resonates like a myth and even on the book's tragic final page, we are left with the sensation that Homer and Langley have done something heroic, that somehow they have thwarted all the perils of the modern age and have now passed into legend.






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