![]() ![]() Doctorow takes some license with the events, placing a 1980 atrocity in El Salvador next to the Jonestown event of 1978, next to the Baptist church bombing of 1963, next to the New York city blackout of 1965. ![]() The 60s features a moon landing, hippies, a concert on the Great Lawn, a bit of free love, and references to some of the other seminal events of the time. The fifties arrive in the form of Senate hearings and TV game shows. The grandson of the family cook, a Tuskegee airman, is killed in North Africa. Jewish representatives come by, raising money for the poor souls in Europe who are suffering at the hands of you-know-who. ![]() Japanese servants are taken away during World War II. Rent raising dances are held during the Depression. A lefty girlfriend is deported in the Palmer Raids of the 1920s. The brothers’ parents are taken in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Characters come into and out of focus, standing in for the events of sundry decades. Homer is mysteriously blinded as a teen, while Langley’s health is seriously compromised when he is gassed in the trenches of World War I. Doctorow (1931-2015) - image from the New Yorker He looks at a wide swath of 20th century American history through the windows of their Fifth Avenue house, extending their lives beyond 1947, swapping some details between the brothers, and tossing in a cast of illustrative characters.Į.L. Doctorow has taken the historical pair and put them to other uses. After their bodies were found in 1947 more than a hundred tons of trash was removed from their house. The bachelor Collyer brothers, of a respected family, were reclusive hoarders who lived in a Manhattan brownstone. It imagines a version of the lives of the Collyer brothers of New York City, notorious for their eccentricities as well as their habit of compulsively hoarding a plethora of various bric-a-brac, newspapers, books and other items. Homer & Langley is a novel by American author E. and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.īrilliantly conceived, gorgeously written, this mesmerizing narrative, a free imaginative rendering of the lives of New York’s fabled Collyer brothers, is a family story with the resonance of myth, an astonishing masterwork unlike any that have come before from this great writer. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers – wars, political movements, technological advances – and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers – the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair, and The March, the novels of E. ![]()
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