Sarah has buggered off to Europe for a bit, so we're lucky to have the lovely Michelle step up and give the books the dress down...

1 March 2010

Homer And Langley
By EL Doctorow

Random House
2009

In 1947, in Harlem, the bodies of Homer and Langley Collyer were extricated from the debris of their family home, where they had lived in hermitage since the abandonment of their parents. A collapsing pile of accumulated rubbish and junk had suffocated Langley; and Homer, his blind and paralysed brother, had died of starvation and dehydration. The Collyer brothers had become part of folklore in New York, living in isolation, boarding up their windows, offending their neighbours with the decay of their home and their excessive hoarding. By the time of their death they had amassed one hundred and thirty tons of waste, and their house was set with endless booby traps, to keep people out. New York was fascinated and appalled by the highly irregular and anti-social way in which they conducted their lives. Everyone wanted to know why they chose to live that way, and what their lives must have been like inside the dimly lit house. Subsequently, a number of books, both factual and fictionalised, have been written about the Collyer brothers, and the mystery and melancholy surrounding their peculiar lives.

E L Doctorow takes this folklore as a jumping off point for this loose fictional account, and explores the imagined lives of these brothers, from his memories of the announcement of their bodily retrieval when he was a child, and the utterances of the society around him as he was growing up. Doctorow's Homer and Langley are witnesses to the greater span of the twentieth century, from their stately home, reinvented on Fifth Avenue. In this novel, the Collyer parents die of disease after World War One. Homer, our blind and gifted narrator, guides us through his feeling world, banging out his story on a brail typewriter. He walks us through The Great Depression, World War Two, McCarthyism and the Vietnam War, amongst other events. Langley is a testament to history, collecting newspapers, fixed on the idea of creating a living paper, cutting and compiling and storing up the memories of America and the world.

Doctorow's two alienated and eccentric central characters are detached from society, and therefore aptly able to observe from a distance. In their eyes, the people around them are the strange ones. Doctorow creates two fascinating men who are so beguiling, that it is only when the outside gets in that you realise how strange they are, so deeply are you immersed in their habits and ways of seeing. There is poetry and great sadness in this novel. It is compelling and smart and thoughtful. While the concept of social misfits and the mentally unwell having the greatest insight into humanity is not a new one, I think it is a true one. Sometimes it is the most unlikely people, the shunned, and the indefinable, that have the greatest lucidity in the end.