Amazon Exclusive: E.L. Doctorow on Homer & Langley
E. L. Doctorow's novels include The March, City of God, The Waterworks, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World's Fair, and Billy Bathgate. His work has been published in thirty-two languages. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. E. L. Doctorow lives in New York. Read his exclusive Amazon essay on Homer & Langley:
 I was a teenager when the Collyer brothers were found dead in their Fifth Avenue brownstone. Instantly, they were folklore. And so there is the real historical existence of them and the mythological existence--two existences, as with Abe Lincoln, though of a less exalted standing. I didn’t know at the time that I would someday write about them, but even then I felt there was some secret to the Collyers--there was something about them still to be discovered under the piles of things in their house--the bales of newspapers and the accumulated detritus of their lives. Was it only that they were junk-collecting eccentrics? You see that every day in the streets of New York. They had opted out--that was the primary fact. Coming from a well-to-do family, with every advantage, they had locked the door and closed the shutters and absented themselves from the life around them. A major move, as life-transforming as emigration. In fact it was a form of emigration, of leave-taking. But where to? What country was within that house? What would have caused them to become the notorious recluses of Fifth Avenue? As myths, the brothers demanded not research but interpretation, and when a few years ago I was finally moved to do this book, I felt as if writing it was an act of breaking and entering just to see what may have been going on in that house, which really meant getting inside two very interesting minds. And with the first sentence, “I’m Homer, the blind brother,” I was in. In one sense I think of Homer & Langley as a road novel--as if they are two people traveling together down a road and having adventures, though in fact they are housebound. It turns out that the world will not let them alone--others intrude on their privacy as if it is the road running through them. As for their collecting, I think of them as curators of their life and times, and their house as a museum of all our lives. That is my idea of them, that is my reading of the Collyer myth. I make them to be two brothers who opted out of civilization and pulled the world in after them.--E.L. Doctorow (Photo © Philip Friedman)
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 When does eccentricity become utter madness? |
| Review Date: September 1, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Richard Cumming, the heartland |
Homer and Langley Collyer were real people. These two brothers were found dead in their Harlem apartment in 1947. They were pack rats. Or, at least Langley was. When their brownstone revealed a hundred tons of newspapers and junk inside, stuff like an old car, the public was amazed and fascinated. Their story has been the stuff of legend ever since.
Doctorow imagines their story as fiction - he furnishes the telling details about their family - the twists and turns that led them to their lonely fates. They live longer in his version by at least 20 some years. There is a wonderful section where hippies move in with them for a bit. They have love affairs. The blind one, Homer, tells the story and Doctorow allows us to share the visions observed with Homer's supposedly sightless eyes.
Michiko Kakutani panned the book today in the NY Times. That's good. When Michiko hates on a book I often love it. And I loved this one. Doctorow's pithy trip down memory lane with these two loveable oddballs is strangely exhilarating.
Homer is a sweetheart, so gentle. Langley is powerful and brilliant. They make for quite a pair. |
Only Doctorow could make this story better....
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| Review Date: September 3, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Robert Busko, North Carolina |
I've long been fascinated by Homer and Langley story. I first heard their tale, twisted though it was, on a Ripley's Believe it or Not years ago. Over the years they would find mention in the odd article here and there. I was very happy to see that E. L. Doctorow devoted a book to them, though it is, after-all a fictional account. Still, Homer and Langley is worth reading.
As in all cases when an author turns a true story into a novel, the reader has to be careful about how much they should actually believe. I was completely convinced by Doctorow's treatment of these two sympathetic misfits. He does a masterful job at taking their story and then creating a world that the story can proceed in.
Two brothers inherit the plush 5th Avenue home of their parents and move in. It isn't long before their odd behavior begins to isolate them from their neighbors. During the ensuing years, Homer quietly goes blind relying on Langley to take care of him. Langley does take care of Homer, but also manages to stuff their plush home full of odd items collected over the years. Not only are odd items hidden in the Harlem brownstone, but Langley saves newspapers and magazines galore. For those of you not familiar with the story, you'll need to read Homer and Langley to see what happens.
Doctorow does plays with time just a bit, moving the story a few years. However, within the confines of the tale, time is relative and in this case simply doesn't matter. Doctorow also chooses to let the story play out and end in pretty much the same way the real one did and I congratulate him for that.
One final thought. For some reason, E. L. Doctorow is always a challenge for me to read. I suspect the difficulty is with me and probably related to his style. However, like and addict, I can't resist his novels. I must admit I had less difficulty with Homer and Langley than City of God, The Waterworks, or Billy Bathgate.
Homer and Langley is one of the stranger stories you'll read. Just keep telling yourself, "its based on reality."
I highly recommend.
Peace always.
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Brilliant American Novel
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| Review Date: December 7, 2009 |
| Reviewer: This Girl, CA United States |
| I was dazzled by this book. I believe Doctorow is metaphorically portraying pathological aspects of the American character in his rendering of the Collyer brothers. They withdraw from engagement with their fellow man, wall themselves up inside mounds of material possessions, refuse to pay for the resources they use, and fail to recognize the depths of their disease. They may have an occasional impulse to engage (as with the hippies), but ultimately, the stream of human history flows through and around them. They die sad and alone, blind, deaf and malnourished inside their fortress of stuff. |
Hello In There
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| Review Date: February 23, 2010 |
| Reviewer: David Zimmerman, Baton Rouge, LA USA |
As he's done often before, Doctorow layers his fertile imagination atop historical characters from 19th and 20th century New York with good result. In "Homer and Langley" the subjects aren't historical giants like Theodore Roosevelt or the Rosenbergs, but rather historical oddities - the reclusive Collyer brothers who lived together in a dilapidated mansion in Harlem for much of the 20th century. As well as being reclusive, the brothers were incessant collectors. At the end, their house was found to be full of old newspapers and an amazing assortment of society's trash and their treasures. Working from the barest historical outline (and from outside it, as many events that he describes occurred after the real Collyers were found dead in 1947), Doctorow imagines the full mythical lives of Homer and Langley Collyer. Homer, the narrator, has been blind from teenage years. His brother Langley was profoundly affected in many ways by his experiences in World War I. Their efforts to become part of society, then to wall it off, and their later attempts to repel its invasion are by turns hilarious, poignant and tragic. After reading this book, you'll never see reclusive, seemingly crotchety senior citizens in the same way, as you'll know that you can't imagine the experiences that made them the way they are.
I found the first half of this short book, which describes the brothers early years and how they came to be recluses, to be of most interest. The middle section in which the Collyers' relative peace is interrupted by a series of visiting groups, including gangsters and hippies, is entertaining but somewhat episodic (apparently by design as Doctorow describes the book as a road novel where the characters are housebound). The ending is just so sad, but somehow inevitable.
I knew of the Collyers from their cameo appearance (or at least that of their house) in another novel, Kevin Baker's Strivers Row: A Novel (P.S.). I really enjoyed "meeting" them in person. You will too in this short, entertaining, and touching read. Five stars for all readers.
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Kingdom Of Rubble
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| Review Date: June 13, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Mark Stevens, Denver |
Quite simply, "Homer & Langley" is one of the most imaginative, interesting and compelling novels I've read in years. Like many books I end up admiring the most, "Homer & Langley" felt a bit slow at first before it gathered momentum. Toward the end, I felt as if I carried the weight and the burden of the stuff these brothers had accumulated in their "kingdom of rubble."
Doctorow's clean, clear imagination is powerful. The prose is straightforward, unadorned. We are deep inside the world of increasingly blind Homer Collyer, whose brother Langley returns from World War I and never seems the same. Homer can't comprehend what Langley has endured in Europe. "Langley would tell me through the following weeks, interrupted occasionally by poundings on the door by the army constabulary for he had left his unit before being legally mustered out and given his discharge papers, and of all the difficulties with the law we were to endure in the years to come, this one, the matter of his technical desertion, was like the preview."
"Technical desertion," for me, is the theme here. What rights does anyone have to define their surroundings, their environment? If you live in the city--particularly if you live in the city--is there an expected level of conformance? Do you have a right not to pay your mortgage or your bill to the "electromonopoly?" The Collyer brothers push the boundaries, whether it's on purpose or not. "The truth is that Langley couldn't say why he'd put the Model T in the dining room. I knew his mind worked: he'd operated from an unthinking impulse, seeing the car on one of his collecting jaunts around town and instantly deciding he must have it while trusting that the reason he found it so valuable would eventually come clear to him."
Doctorow takes the Collyer brothers' fictional life decades beyond the real people this book is based upon--and to me toward the end it was hard to separate the Collyers' struggles and slow demise with parallel woes the country faces, including the "the endless process of corporate mutations in which nothing changes or is improved." The story spans the 20th century, from "glorious elegance" of post-World War I, including free-flowing tea and dance parties, until the brothers live in one giant but miserable enclave and "tunneled passageways."
You can't help but feel the weight of their world and admire Doctorow's ability to show their gradual withdrawal from society even as they remained kind and human to each other.
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