Homer and Langley have entered the canon of American folklore in a way that few other eccentrics have. Books have been written about them (we all know the kind, best described as “salacious” or “tell-all”), they have been turned into lurid objects of intrigue, almost wholly with little respect for their humanity or the forces that shaped them into the kinds of people they were. Doctorow’s project is different. He is interested in the historical forces that made Homer and Langley, not the sensationalizing journalism that turns them into “hoarders,” a word that thankfully doesn’t even appear in the novel.
After Langley returns from World War I shell shocked, he learns what Homer has known for a while: both of their parents have succumb to the Spanish Flu. Their parents left them a four-story brownstone and an income is never disclosed, but through ingenuity they do well for themselves. They host a series of public dances for the community’s benefit. As time wears on, Langley starts to become increasing paranoid about the household finances, even challenging the utilities companies and the bank who holds the house to come and get what they’re owed from him personally. This is when his collections of books, musical instruments, automobiles, and other material all started to appear.
Throughout the book, both brothers but especially Homer encounter romantic attachments that never blossom. Doctorow draws Langley as a more aloof figure, but I really, truly, deeply felt Homer’s need for love and affection. Maybe like Tiresias his blindness conferred upon him another, greater kind of sight – of innocence, love, and companionship, all of which Langley wanted nothing to do with. All I can really say here is that Homer’s disappointments were heartbreaking for me as a reader.
E. L. Doctorow is as fascinated with American history as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon are with American hysteria. Though this is only my second Doctorow novel (the first was “The City of God,” which I don’t remember much about at all), but it seems that much of his work is crafted in such a way as to have the reader feel that history is actually running past, or even though, you. The effect of this can be both enchanting and disorienting. Doctorow extends their lifetimes by several decades (they both died in 1947) so that we read of them speaking about the moon landing and Jonestown. This is partially what I mean by disorienting. I realize that this is a work of fiction, but this need to extend their lives by more than a generation seemed like an odd, out-of-place decision. I felt that there was plenty of fascinating history to deal with before the date of their real deaths to not have to turn them into centenarians.
On the whole, this was an empathetic portrayal of two people whose historiographies were in dire need of empathy, and I appreciate that. There is something about the overall execution of the novel that I can’t quite put my finger on that leaves me, on the whole, not as moved as I felt I should have been, despite Langley’s experiences in the War and Homer’s failures in love. I’m curious to know what readers of other Doctorow novels think compared to this, or if they can even be compared.
