With the same dexterity as marks Doctorow's earlier work, Homer and Langley takes historical figures from life in New York and weaves them into a tale about what it means to be American.
The Collyers are real-life brothers, born into a blue-blood New York family at the turn of the 20th century. They gained infamy as hermits cooped up in a Harlem brownstone. Doctorow's story humanises them.
The novel is narrated by Homer, the blind brother, who is all too aware of the futility of his life in a nation that values work above all else. Langley, the mad one, refuses to accept Homer's inadequacy by concocting remedies to fix him, just as he tries to fix the everyday contradictions of American life by endlessly collating mountains of newspaper cuttings into one edition for all time. His fascination with invention, but abhorrence of the society that created it, suggests a critique of Americanism. But perhaps this is too deep a reading of what is essentially a sad and beautiful story of the love of two brothers rejected by the rest of the world.
Homer and Langley
E L Doctorow
Little, Brown, 224pp, £11.99
