Review: Homer & Langley

Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s interesting to come back to the king of historical realism – the school of literature where you have fictional characters interacting with historical figures – in our moment of “fake news” processing. This one is from 2009, another era altogether at this point, but I’ve meant to get to it since it first came out. At his best, in Ragtime, Doctorow can be close to incandescent; he lets us see the way a semi-forgotten series of events set the stage for what we know today. At his less good, like Billy Bathgate, he seems more interested in having fun with his material than in finding some shining immediacy to it.

This one has some powerful and powerfully relevant moments. Homer and Langley are the sons of a late 19th century New York socialite family, but things go awry when Homer goes blind in his youth, their parents die of the flu, and Langley returns from World War I with PTSD from being gassed. They proceed to live in the same Park Avenue mansion for the next sixty years, gradually turning into obsessive hoarders and filling the house with junk until its unnavigable and barely livable.

Homer narrates the entire story, and there’s a power in his point-of-view. On the one hand, his blindness is both literal and metaphorical; he can’t see what’s becoming of their home. To him, it still looks as it did when their parents were alive, as it looked before the American century really began. On the other hand, his acute other senses come into play so that this is a book very much about sound – about the sounds he hears and overhears, and about the stunning sound of Doctorow’s prose.

Homer is more or less the passenger here, and it’s Langley who brings the philosophy. He insists he has become a hoarder in pursuit of a greater truth. He develops a theory that all history is redundant. Everything that happens is an iteration of something that has happened before, and every individual is a replacement for someone preceding him or her. He saves newspapers in large bundles with the intent of creating a single edition of a universal newspaper, a chronicle of every event as it happens in a kind of Platonic way. It’s an impossible task, and he seems to know that, but it gives him an excuse to try to find a place for everything.

The central challenge to that claim lies the prospect that he and Homer are somehow “sui generis,” that they are unlike everyone else and therefore the exceptions that break the rule he is trying to prove. I get the impression that’s the view that Doctorow takes, and it’s sometimes what Homer seems to believe himself. These are characters who emerge as distinctive, who endure across the decades, bringing a piece of the distant past to life in the late 1970s. They are, in many respects, Edwardians who live long enough to seem like proto-hippies. (And, in a nice move, they come to serve as the models for a pair of underground comix figures very much like R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural.)

As I read this, then, the brothers’ story is largely the challenge of extricating a sense of self from the suffocating detritus of everyday life. Langley tries literally to bury them under junk, but something distinct and human remains. [SPOILER] In fact, that’s most poignantly the case in the closing pages when it becomes apparent that Langley has died under an avalanche of old papers and Homer, unable to feed himself in his blind and trapped-in-the-labyrinth condition, sits at his typewriter wondering where his brother has gone. Even at the end, he’s a voice trying to make sense of his existence amidst a clutter that’s overwhelming.

I think that’s a powerful image, and I can imagine it’s why Doctorow went with this story. I’m confused about a couple key elements, though. This is based on the real-life Collyer brothers; Doctorow leaves the names unchanged, but he moves the setting up a couple decades so that they live well past the 1940s when they, in fact, died. That substantial change aside, though, Doctorow causes little to happen. His prose is gorgeous, but there’s little plot. These are men who have attempted to step outside history; they’re visited by Prohibition and 1950s era gangsters, and they get to know 1960s counter-culture types, but they are never pulled into any substantial action. I’m confused why Doctorow, if he’s willing to tamper so much with his source material, doesn’t bring in more of the conflict that fiction usually provides. It gives us, in other words, a greater element of “the fake” than I’m used to from Doctorow, and I’m not sure what such a price buys for it.

In a way, this is also a love letter to New York – where the Collyers remain a kind of urban legend – but it’s told through a boarded-up window. It’s a quasi-celebration of the city, but it’s withdrawn and restrained. It implies a great exuberance outside their doors, but it gives us only the slightest glimpses of it.

As an aside, while Doctorow is regarded as the king of this genre, my personal hero within it is William Kennedy. I think Ironweed and Roscoe are the equals of Ragtime – which is saying a lot for all three novels – and I think Kennedy’s “lesser” novels are stronger than the other Doctorow I’ve read. Doctorow seems ever in awe of the city he’s chronicling; Kennedy, who is the great chronicler of Albany, New York, takes on his city with a roguish grin, loving it for its corruption and even more for the great humanity that corruption can never entirely erase.

In any case, this is a short and memorable work, but it’s memorable more for its tone and the longing at its heart than for the way it might have come together as part of a more ambitious collision between two ways of looking at the world.


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