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    Homer & Langley: A Novel
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    Homer & Langley: A Novel
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    Homer & Langley: A Novel
    Audiobook7 hours

    Homer & Langley: A Novel

    Written by E.L. Doctorow

    Narrated by Arthur Morey

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World's Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work.

    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. 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. 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 . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

    Brilliantly 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.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 1, 2009
    ISBN9780739334171
    Unavailable
    Homer & Langley: A Novel

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    Reviews for Homer & Langley

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    • 5/5
      Well, this book is absolutely beautiful. I am still thinking about what I want to say about Homer & Langley, while simultaneously composing a letter to E.L. Doctorow in my head. I felt this novel deeply and I am marveling at Doctorow's ability with words and language which activate the senses while creating images that linger.More of a review to come. Okay, so after pondering for a couple of days, here is what I have come up with:This novel was released in 2009, but just this past fall, the trade paperback edition became available. I am aware that Homer & Langley received very mixed reviews, with readers feeling either middling about it or loving it. Like any good historical novelist pushing the limits of his craft, Doctorow takes chances. The author’s treatment of the history was a negative for some critics, while others felt the narrator was less than engaging and the imagined historical details were unconvincing, while others still, including the New York Times, opined that Doctorow "never succeeds in making the brothers’ transition from mild eccentricity to out-and-out madness understandable to the reader." Yet even the detractors gave a nod to the author’s stylistic prose.My reaction to this novel was very strong and I felt it deeply – with my senses and my emotions. Repeatedly I found myself imagining Homer’s ability to take in so much about the world after he lost his sight. The intuition he possessed coupled with other senses being heightened made for a very evolved character with insights that helped filled in the holes of his life. Langley made for an equally interesting, though not as fully fleshed character. Because we are receiving the story from Homer, and though their relationship was unusually strong, we are never fully privy to the action inside Langley’s brain. I do wonder, however, if Langley would be self-aware enough as to categorize his behaviours as well as he categorized his newspaper articles? To me, it is a beautifully imagined brotherhood Doctorow has created; a story inspired by how Homer and Langley lived, rather than sensationalizing how they died. Certainly, many liberties were taken by Doctorow in creating this story and it seems to be this aspect of the book that has the largest share of naysayers debating the label of historical fiction being applied to Doctorow’s book. The book spans nearly 70 years, from just before WWI to the years after the Vietnam War. In this regard, many eras are referenced through the brothers lives. But, it is not so much a recounting of the unusual story of the Collyer brothers as a journey inside that story. Call it a meditation, and a metaphor.Doctorow’s novel is absolutely beautiful, to me, and I am amazed that he could accomplish so much in such a short (the edition I have is only 208 pages) book. "I’m Homer, the blind brother." is the very first line of Homer & Langley. We know immediately, then, this story will offer a very unique perspective, while signalling, also, that the pages within contain not just a usual story. I feel the eras covered – WWI, the Great Depression, prohibition, the Korean War, The assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., the hippie movement and the Vietnam War – allowed the book to read, almost like a road trip novel with Homer and Langley benefiting from social interactions, without leaving their home. That Doctorow moved the setting of his novel from the actual home in Harlem, to an imagined Manhattan brownstone on Fifth Avenue, directly across from Central Park, likely allowed for more artistic license with the outside world coming into the brothers’ home so they could have first-hand experiences while being nearly complete shut-ins.There is no doubt many found, and continue to find the real story of the Collyer brothers sad. If you look at photos taken from inside their home, you wonder how it is even possible they lived among all of the detritus. What Doctorow has done so well, then, is ask us to look at the tale through a different lens and dig within ourselves and extend compassion to two brothers who were likely never really understood and continue, in this world of media-provoked hoarders interest, to be viewed as bizarre and reprehensible. In Doctorow’s view, Homer & Langley are sensitive, highly-intelligent, lonely men, trying to find their purpose in the world. I think this is something we can all relate to and appreciate.
    • 3/5
      I really liked this book a lot. Sorry this is so late coming, but a ton had gone on and I was out of town. When I got back I skimmed back over this book, furthering my good opinion. The thing that I liked best is you never knew what was going to happen next - I guess the randomness of the book appealed to me. The characters were exquisitely written, and it was a wonderful story.
    • 4/5
      Doctorow reimagines the lives of two famous New York eccentrics as a way of touring the twentieth century's ups and downs. The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, inherit their parents' mansion at the far north end of Fifth Avenue, across from the park, just at the end of the (first) World War. At about the same time, Homer goes blind, and Langley returns from the war shellshocked or something like.

      It's sometimes a little tiresome to watch Doctorow steering the plot to an encounter with yet another Great Historical Moment: Prohibition, gangsters, talking pictures, war after war after war, the hippies, the blackout, the moon landing. But these are all told obliquely, from Homer's point of view, and the only thing that really grates is his continual pining for—and conquest of!—women a half, a third, a quarter of his age. At least Homer himself retains the capacity to be surprised when it happens.

      There were a real Homer and Langley Collyer, but except for their death—trapped inside the house by Langley's half-century of collected newspapers, possibly-repairable mechanisms, and projects and rooms abandoned to rot and rats—Doctorow invents freely. That seems to be his usual mode, but this is the first work of his I've read.

      The audiobook narration is very well done; the narrator has a perfect voice, gravelly and urban without getting into stereotype, and modulates it within his range to give each character a distinct identity. There was one egregious mispronunciation (Homer's vocabulary is at a 19th-century standard), but I forget now what it was. And it was especially nice to listen to the book rather than read it in print, since it is supposed to be written by the blind Homer, sitting at his Braille typewriter inside the maze his brother has made of their house.
    • 2/5
      I am a big fan of roughly half of Doctorow's work. Though this one started with a sense of greatness, ultimately it falls in line with the least favored half of his oeuvre for me. Like several others reviewers, I was disenchanted by Doctorow's blatant changes to the Collyer brothers' story. The truth has enough pathos--I don't think Doctorow needed to distort it to make his telling a captivating one. I also often had a sneaking feeling that the book had multiple small continuity slip-ups, as when the blind narrator Homer frequently describes visual scenes in abundant detail, or when now-deaf Homer mentions sounds. These issues can be rationalized a few times--maybe Langely told Homer what something looked like down to every sumptuous detail--but recurring as they do they add up.

      Doctorow can be a fantastic writer, but in this one he doesn't seem to be achieving either his full potential or the potential of his story.
    • 3/5
      Short novel about the lives of the Collyer brothers, and the mythos that developed around them. Odd how they went from just being reclustive to total hoarding and isolation. A bit dull in the later bits, but the very end is tragic. Doctorow gains points for his style.
    • 4/5
      Homer and Langley is a wonderful story about two brothers which are living at the Fifth Avenue during the 20th century. Homer had lost his eyesight when he was a teenager, but his other senses were really sharp especially his sense of hearing. They have lost their parents early and were living together their whole live. The most important 'credo' was their self-reliance and they worked it out excessively. During nearly the whole century they were confronted by all different kinds of social changes and it seems that they were diving into those adventures with a great pleasure.
    • 4/5
      This story follows the brothers Collyer after the death of their parents in 1918. Homer is blind and relies on his brother Langley who, after returning from the war, becomes more and more eccentric. This eccentricity expands to include Homer as the house and their name moves from being respected to being a joke within the neighbourhood.From being used as a dance room during the war through to housing an injured gangster and then being a place for hippies to sleep you see the brothers become more introspective and believe the world is against them. They start trying to break from society by getting an old car into the house to try and run for electricity but ultimately society and the norm drag them back into its grip. And, ultimately, have a hand in the end of their days.A good book to read it is a journal of the life of two brothers who's problems becom reality to them in the end.
    • 5/5
      The real Collyer brothers lived as recluses and compulsive hoarders at 2078 5th Avenue until their deaths in 1947. E L Doctorow very loosely bases this fiction on the two men, moving their home south along 5th Avenue to face Central Park, adapting a few facts, changing much and adding a great deal of invention including extending their lives into the latter part of the twentieth century.Homer and Langley are well educated, and Homer who narrates is an accomplished classical pianist, but while in his teens he starts to lose his sight and very soon is totally blind. When Langley returns from The Great War, his health damaged by exposure to mustard gas, he learns that both parents have been claimed by Spanish Flu. The brothers, yet barely men and ill equipped for independent life, continue to live in the family mansion which gradually fills with Langley's eclectic finds from his nightly rummages and the accumulated daily newspapers he reads.Homer takes us through their lives together from boyhood and up to his final words on one of the several Braille typewriters Langley bought him. It becomes a social record of the twentieth century, Homer supplies no dates yet we know where we are by reference to other events. But the story is essentially that of the fictionalised brothers, their diminishing staff of servants, their failed relationships with women, the few friendships they make over the years, their battle with the neighbours, authorities and utility providers, and about their obvious but unmentioned devotion to each other; two men made thoroughly human and endearing, and increasingly eccentric.What it all amounts to is a remarkable piece of fiction, superbly and intelligently written, touched with humour, often moving and ultimately heartbreaking, I read the final pages with tears in my eyes - rarely does a book so affect me.
    • 3/5
      This was my first experience reading Doctorow and I was a little bit disappointed. This is a highly fictionalized account of the famous reclusive Collyer brothers of New York City. Perhaps I should have suspected that reading about recluses wouldn't be very exciting...Probably the only things that made it worth finishing instead of giving up (besides that it was only slightly over 200 pages) were the encounters with history, which were all figments of the author's imagination, so far as I know. The brothers probably were quite an interesting pair, and it's too bad that they didn't write an account of their experiences before dying in their trash-packed house. Frankly, reading the Wikipedia page on the brothers was as interesting as this book and took less time. I didn't mind the writing style of Doctorow, just didn't find it all that enthralling, so I might attempt another of his books in the future.
    • 5/5
      I read City of God by E.L. Doctorow with my book club and didn't care for it. I had already bought Homer and Langley so I decided I better read it anyway. Luckily I did because it was so cool to read a story from a blind man's point of view.Have you heard of the Collyer brothers? They were real people, known because they inherited a bunch of money from their parents and became reclusive hoarders. This is an almost completely fictionalized story about them; they live until the 1970s in the story instead of when they actually tragically died in the 1940s, and their birth order is reversed.What E.L. does for us is take a fact, like that the chassis of a Model T was found in Homer and Langley's house after they died, and imagine the story of how it came to be there. We get to share in the glorious details of amassing a hoard. Ok, hoarding is an illness but in this story it doesn't seem so sad.I love the characters and the journey we take with them through history. Fascinating story. E.L. Doctorow has been redeemed.
    • 5/5
      I’m not normally one to rave about a novel, preferring to keep my opinions measured as taste for literature is so indefinable. But this is a great book! There I said it! Read Homer and Langley and you will find something within its pages that will move you … either to tears or laughter … but most likely, both.The Collyer brothers did exist. They are firmly established in New York folklore as the eccentrics who lived in a brownstone on Fifth Avenue in the first half of the 20th century. It is now believed that they, or at least one of them suffered from disposophobia, a hoarding syndrome that eventually accumulated 130 tons of debris in their home over several decades. Homer loses his sight and Langley much of his mind over the years, but their quirky ways have you chuckling then laughing out loud as Langley finds new tricks to beat the power and water companies. You are unwittingly drawn into a bizarre world that leaves the forward momentum of New York society behind, with the brothers only glimpsing fragments of the changing world through occasional callers awarded visitors’ rights. A sad, but strangely endearing set of circumstances. Doctorow takes some liberties with the facts, but in the process comes up with a brilliant novel, in which Homer records his and Langley’s life and means on an old Braille typewriter, putting a human face to a story that has reached mythical proportions in America. I actually listened to this in audio-book format and the reader, William Hope, did a fantastic job. His take on Langley is academy winning stuff. Audio-book production in the right hands can enrich your experience, or kill it cold. Thankfully, everything works in this case and you are left feeling the impact of an amazing story for days.
    • 5/5
      Homer and Langley was a great read. This was an imaginatively fictionalized account of the Collyer brothers. Doctorow used beautiful yet concise language to really humanize these two eccentric, reclusive and difficult brothers. For someone like me, who idolizes NYC and gets giddy at the thought of one day living steps from Central Park, this account of NYC life (albeit an unorthodox life) in the early 20th century was just lovely. And real. Very real and alive. Which makes it lovely. I also feel like I need to just go ahead and say that I feel like I understood the Collyer brothers, too. Not on every level, but Doctorow made these characters sympathetic and relate-able. I mean, of course I didn't get mustard gassed in WWI and I am neither deaf nor blind, but I get the reclusive desire. The distrust of large companies and anger at the government. Feelings of loneliness and yearning for deeper personal connections. Being disappointed in relationships yet hopeful and nostalgic for them. Doctorow really created a story that made sense. Their descent was inevitable and I understood why it was happening. Human nature can be very complex and murky, but this book shed light on how sane insanity and paranoia can seem when you're in the throes of it. I also would like to say that the last 5 pages of the book were so incredibly written. Really fantastic writing! 
    • 1/5
      I want to like Doctorow because so many critics compare him to Dos Passos, but I just don't care for him. Another Doctorow book I can't get into enough to finish.
    • 3/5
      Being the lives of two eccentric brothers who pass their days as eccentric recluses in commodious digs in the city. Their considerable life spans take us from the borning of the 20th century into at least the 1970's. Doctorow has written a novel which reads like the work of a much younger novelist, and that's not really a compliment. It is basically plotless, and relies of strength of characterization and description to engage the reader. This works about as well as it ever does.
    • 5/5
      Doctorow’s fictionalized account of real-life brothers, Homer & Langley Collyer is touching, sad and sometimes humorous. The shy brother is musically talented and invites ladies to concerts he gives in his home as a novel way to meet them; the other brother is scientifically oriented, always creating one odd gadget or other. Plus, he is obsessed with current events leading to his idea of creating only one newspaper...the only newspaper that will ever need to be printed since events repeat themselves. Therefore, he compulsively does research and ends up with the house full of several years worth of the daily news precariously stacked everywhere. The novel allows the reader to experience the brothers as young boys in a normal middle-class upbringing in late 19th century New York up to their sad, lonely ending in the 1940’s as eccentric, reclusive old men dying in the same childhood home with no one missing them or aware of their deaths for a time. Besides being very interesting, reading "Homer & Langley" was a reminder to me that as we all get busy in our own lives, we should pay attention to other people who may have needs (some serious) that go unanswered. We can make a difference in another's life.
    • 4/5
      There's a self-awareness in the attitudes of some older people I have known that I truly admire. For all of us, I would imagine, age does not make life simpler. It adds layers of memory, junk, garbage, abandoned projects, abandoned hobbies and potential, forgotten friends, physical impairments, and mental instability. And I think that sometimes we treat older people like they're supposed to act like old people, and that's wrong. There's a beautiful decline of purity from birth to death - we can never go back and make ourselves more innocent or less knowledgeable or less alive. That's what I got out of this book.We might read this book and say how horrible it would be, to live as a hoarder, amid piles of filth, to lose our minds, to die alone; or we might accept the fates of the characters and the fact that they lived and died epically, entirely of their own design. It makes sense that the characters lived longer than a lifetime, and went through major world events and personal traumas and some lovely experiences all in stride, as if they had never expected any less for themselves. We should never expect less for ourselves.
    • 1/5
      I would never have read this book by choice, but it was the assignment for my monthly book group, so I struggled through it. It turned out that most of the other members felt the same way. The most common reaction to it was, quite simply, horror, as we watched the narrator decline from a young man with talent, money, and the whole world open to him, to someone trapped in an unimaginably small life. Doctorow is a skilled writer, so the language is lovely, and there are some fun moments along the way. And a philosopher could be intrigued by the narrowing of a life until it consists solely of one's own consciousness. ***NOTE: Spoilers ahead ******However, I am left questioning the legitimacy of the whole project. The story is very loosely based on the real-life Collyer brothers, who gained fame in New York as eccentric recluses. But the facts of their lives are so different from what happens to the characters here, that I wondered why Doctorow didn't just use different names. Fiction about real people always makes me a little squeamish, but normally I can see some reason for it. Most often it appears to be the author's attempt to understand more about a historical figure. The label of fiction is an important qualifier, reminding us that this is just one possible interpretation. (Fiction based on real people can also be used to give a deeper appreciation and understanding of their time and place, but these characters are too isolated to help the reader get to know 20th century New York City.)In Homer & Langley, the first justification is also clearly not what's happening. Doctorow has changed too many important facts. First of all, the real Collyer brothers died in 1947; in the book they're alive until the 1970's. In real life, Langley was a concert-level pianist; Doctorow gives this ability to Homer. Fictional Langley serves in World War I and is severely injured with mustard gas, while I saw no reference to this in real life. Real Homer was crippled with rheumatism, and later with blindness. Doctorow omits the rheumatism altogether, has the blindness happen during his teen years, and later has him lose his hearing as well. The fictional parents both died during the 1918 flu epidimic; in real life, the brothers' father left the family in 1919. He died in 1923 and the mother in 1929. This novel is basically an exploration of Doctorow's character Homer Collyer, the narrator. But since that character is so different from the real-life human being of the same name, I find this use of him offensive. This would have been a much better novel if it had been presented as straight fiction. In fact, since writing this review, I have decided to change my rating from two stars to one. Read at your own risk.
    • 4/5
      In 1947, Homer and Langley Collyer were found dead, in their Manhattan brownstone, buried beneath a mountain of trash. This is a highly fictionalized account of what led these reclusive brothers to this devastating point. Born to wealth, the story follows the brothers through several decades, as they lose their parents and slowly withdraw from society. Homer, the narrator, goes blind at an early age and Langley becomes an obsessivecollector, a hoarder. The men also refuse to pay any of their bills, leading to many clashes with the city. Compared to Doctorow’s more ambitious work, this book may be somewhat slight but it does contains his usual strong prose and his story-telling is first-rate. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Moving, well-written, and if one isn't careful, it can be read as one breath, one long stream of consciousness. I enjoyed this tale of eccentric brothers (based on real brothers).
    • 4/5
      Homer and Langley Collyer were real people who lived and died in the family mansion on 5th Ave. in Manhatten. E. L. Doctorow has written a moving, disturbing fictional account of their lives. To read this book is to be inside this house with Homer, blind, and eventually deaf who lives through his music, and his brother Langley disabled by mustard gas in the First World War. After their parents death in the Spanish Influenza epidemic, their mostly solitary lives became even more so. Though they have fleeting interaction with various characters, some lasting over a period of years, Langley in particular becomes more unbalanced as time goes on. A casual collection of miscellaneous objects of interest becomes over a period of time, overwhelming. At the time of their death it had accumulated to over 130 tons of trash. In the end Langley's misguided attempts to protect them from thieves is their undoing as Langley falls victim to one of his own elaborate booby traps, and without his brother to feed him, the now completely blind and deaf Homer starves to death. The telling, so alive through Doctorow's words and descriptions, the way these men spring again into life, is akin to reliving their story, so beautiful and sad as you follow them through the years and step by step into their doom. Only you are left to walk away... EXCELLENT!!
    • 2/5
      A terrible disappointment. Ragtime and The March are two of my all-time favorite books, and so I really looked forward to Homer & Langley. But it remained stilted and two-dimensional throughout. Doctorow's decision to tell this story from the first-person in Homer's mannered voice missed the mark on two counts. Doctorow wanting to represent Homer not as a miscreant but as a gentle soul leaves us instead with a bland and colorless narrator. As a result, the writing here is nowhere near as expressive as in his other great books. Similarly, the seminal characters and events come across as caricatures and cliches. Most glaring in this regard is the absence of any insight into the brothers themselves. The reasons for their pathetic condition and decline are never really explored. Yes, Homer goes blind and Langley's damaged in the War, but they never show much, if any, self-awareness. And we never get to understand anything new or interesting about the human condition through these two tragic people.
    • 5/5
      A great read for Doctorow fans. This is a fictionalized treatment of the true story of two brothers living in turn-of-the-century New York. While they were born into wealth, they fall on hard times after their parents die and ultimately fall prey to their hoarding obsession.
    • 5/5
      Homer & Langley is an incredibly well-written novel that could have been written by Salinger. Between the laconic and tight prose, the New York setting, the eccentric, ultra-cool yet plain characters and the poetic-tragic writing and story, one gets a Salinger novel with Doctorow's punchy-ness. Stunning, tragic, the all-too-real quirks and personality of an old wealth family is yanked, over time, into the modern world. Hoarding, parsimony, disability, and veteran status continue to drive the brothers into a shut-in world as they experience real and imagined visitation from a handful of boarders, staff, hippies and a love interest. While bleak and touching, the story becomes almost moot in the face of premier-level writing.
    • 3/5
      Doctorow seemed to be trying to hard...or maybe not trying enough with this book. It was one of those Forest Gump kinds of books where the protagonists are involved in every bit of history, but it just didn't make me care that much. Good things...the narrator did a fine job and the ending was haunting. If only the themes in the ending had started earlier.
    • 5/5
      I was intrigued about the Collyer brothers after reading about them in an article I was reading and then I found out that Homer & Langley was coming out in a few months.I didn't know what to expect about the book since I didn't know too much about the brothers, but as far as historical fiction goes, I was happy with the result. What I liked most about the book were the complex emotions that the brothers have for each other and the outside world. Other things that I have read about them make them sound as if they were only mean, reclusive people with no care for anyone else in the world. This book gives them another layer of character that makes them seem sensitive and scared of what may happen as they grow older.I would definitely recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      Well written. Amazingly disfunctional brothers. One piles the house with newspapers and other junk and the other goes blind and deaf. Ends when one brother dies and the other--blind and deaf is left alone.
    • 5/5
      A master storyteller unwinds the tale of the Collyer brothers who lived on 5th Ave in New York City and died in their home crushed by the tons of stuff they had collected over the years. Told from the viewpoint of Homer who went blind as a young man, Doctorow allows the tale of how they accumulated so much stuff to be a rather benign and logical story. Langley collects newspapers because he is going to produce the ultimate newspaper with the ultimate news in it. Machines and appliances are brought home in an effort to use spare parts, or to have duplicates in different rooms. The end is heartbreaking, but is not one of despair.
    • 4/5
      A fictionalized account of the life of the Collyer brothers who lived together in Harlem and when they died, over 190 TONS of rubbish was found in their home.Their story was told through Homer (the blind brother) eyes, and it felt as if they were conjoined' -their relationship was that symbiotic. Sadly, Langely went to serve in WWI, and after an attack from mustard gas, was never the same.An interesting journey with madmen from rich, priviledged NYC youth to a sick decent into mania.
    • 4/5
      Homer & LangleyE. L. DoctorowRandom House2009HardcoverISBN: 1400064945Autographed Copy224 pagesConfessions of a book reviewer:Confession One: I currently own a number of E. L. Doctorow’s novels but I’ve never actually read any of his works. That is until Homer & Langley. (I never understood what I was missing but now have something to look forward to.)Confession Two: I had not heard of the Collyer brothers before reading Doctorow’s loosely based account of these very real yet tragic characters. Being a Midwesterner this particular story had never come to my attention.Back Story:Homer and Langley Collyer were the sons of a successful doctor and as such grew up in the relative comfort of pre-World War I Manhattan. They lived and died in a brownstone mansion in Harlem, which was in a fashionable and trendy neighborhood when it was originally purchased. Both brothers attended Columbia University. Homer received a degree in admiralty law and Langley earned a degree in engineering. As the neighborhood deteriorated and after the abandonment of their father and the eventual death of both parents the brothers inherited the mansion and became hermits and hoarders in their own home. Electing to remove themselves from society the two men began to hoard an eclectic list of items; tons of bound newspapers, books (law and medicine), mechanical contraptions (including a working Model T), scientific oddities (jars of medical samples), and numerous household appliances and knick-knacks. When burglars, who’d heard they were hoarding cash, gold, and jewelry attempted to break in the men closed off the house and set traps to deter additional would-be thieves and intruders. In the end the massive hoarding (over 134 tons of clutter) and the improvised traps would prove their downfall. Both men were found dead in 1947. Homer succumbed to starvation after the death of his brother and Langley was crushed to death by one of his own traps.Book review:I found E. L. Doctorow’s style lyrical, provocative, and spellbinding and “Homer & Langley” is beautifully written and wonderfully illustrative of character, place and time. Told in the first person by Homer Langley the story engrossingly recounts the genesis of the hermetic attitudes adopted by the men and gives us an insight as to how and why their world changed so dramatically over the course of their lives.Doctorow takes minor liberties with the time line in which the Collyer Brothers lived but it in no way deters from the story itself. He succinctly presents world events through the lives of the brothers as they intersect each other. Beginning just after World War I and culminating in the 1980’s we follow the brothers through their failing health and their troubles with the utility companies, banks, and neighbors. Knowing full well at the beginning of the story that it was going to end in tragedy I was, nonetheless, captivated by the details and Doctorow’s prose. If Homer Langley had lived to recount his memoir this is much what it might have been. Doctorow handles the Collyer’s history as it was surely meant to be. Insightful and tragic yet full of the spirit and nature of men trapped by circumstance he gives voice to a family that could not do so on their own.As the narrative glides through the decades Homer and Langley are befriended by a gangster, invite friends and neighbors into their home to dance, turn their home into a safe haven for immigrants, take up with a group of counter-culture hippies, and then plunge into the depths of ill-mental and physical health and paranoia.In the final chapters of the story, after Homer has become completely blind and when he’s lost most of his hearing, a sympathetic character tells him, “You think a word and you can hear its sound. I am telling you what I know – words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.” This is, I believe, Doctorow’s Creative Doctrine and he certainly follows the law to the letter in this story. Lyrical, musical and emotionally evocative “Homer & Langley” is a must read.4 stars out of 5
    • 4/5
      A fictionalized account of Homer and Langley Collyer, two infamous brothers who turned their Fifth Avenue mansion into a junk-filled health hazard. I remember reading a little about the Collyers as a kid; they were in some book my parents had that listed eccentrics.It was an unusual step for Doctorow to bring the brothers into modern times, at least into the 1970's, as I believe they actually died in the 1940's. Maybe he thought they died too young, or maybe he wanted to show them as modern-day hoarders. Though the hoarding problem was Langley's and became more pronounced as the book goes on, the story is focused on the bond between the brothers, their views of the world and Homer's attempts to form relationships.