"Homer and Langley" by E.L. Doctorow

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book critic should try to keep herself out of the review. Not only are personal details and observations generally useless and digressive – they can, at worst, intrude on the analysis that is meant to be kept true to standards as high as we can maintain them in the “chunk-y, list-y” age of journalism.

 

However, I cannot adhere to this particular protocol in reviewing E.L. Doctorow’s new novel “Homer and Langley” (Doubleday), because I was astonished at how different my read was from the one Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times had, detailed in her review last week. In fact, I found the book I read nearly unidentifiable from Kakutani’s review – so much so that I’m having a tough time deciding whether to tell you what I thought or to show you some of her observations first.

 

Let’s try it this way:

 

Kakutani wrote: “Mr. Doctorow, using his patented blend of fact and fiction, has tackled [the story of the Collyer brothers] here, producing a slight, unsatisfying, Poe-like story that turns out to be a study in morbid psychology.”

 

I say: The story of Homer and Langley Collyer is best known because of Marcia Davenport’s 1954 novel “My Brother’s Keeper,” and the Collyers together form one of history’s most curious and most macabre cases of “hoarding,” in which a person or persons stockpiles objects (sometimes food and water, too, but mostly just stuff – newspapers, machines, books, clothing, and more) to the point of excess and danger.

 

Doctorow, in other words, could have easily and with license overwritten a huge novel simply by cataloguing his characters’ various collections. That is not to refute Kakutani’s claim that the novel is “slight” it is simply to point out that from the moment I began reading, I felt Doctorow had aimed for an elegant restraint.

 

Restraint can result in a novel that is too thin – yet as Doctorow’s brothers live, love, work, walk, and hoard through much of the 20th century, I found that while there were spots in which Homer and/or Langley were thinly developed, it was usually during a time in which other characters (e.g., their mother, their housekeeper, their motley parade of tenants) took the spotlight.

 

To another critic, this evidently read as “slight;” to me, it read as if the novel was a series sepia-toned photographs fading in and out in rapid progression. This is also where I found my satisfaction in the book. I didn’t care about any dramatic plot developments, because the “photographs and memories” approach Doctorow chose kept me thinking about other events, people, and ideas that made it easier to accept the very very tiny changes that happened in the brothers’ lives.

 

Kakutani wrote: “…the reader unfortunately gets little visceral sense of the city or the country in these pages. After all, Homer and Langley spent much of their lives as recluses and came to inhabit a suffocating realm bounded by the walls of their town house. As a result, there are few excursions into the New York City Mr. Doctorow knows so well, and lots of time — far more than the reader might wish — spent inside the Collyer brothers’ musty, dusty, junk-filled home.”

 

I say: I believe that was Doctorow’s point: That while scarcely anything changes in the brothers’ decades-long routine (Homer becomes increasingly isolated by blindness, Langley by what seem to be depression and anxiety compounded by heaping doses of obsessive-compulsive disorder and paranoia), so much has changed and is changing in the outside world that every pile Langley builds represents its own type of obsolescence – a perfect example is the pile of World War I military uniforms Langley believes will be a great source of income, but that the impoverished siblings wind up donning themselves when the rest of their clothes become threadbare.

 

With symbolism like this, I can’t find “Homer and Langley” anything but satisfying.

 

Kakutani wrote: “But as the Collyers isolate themselves from the world and retreat to their monstrously overcluttered house, the narrative stutters and stalls. Mr. Doctorow never succeeds in making the brothers’ transition from mild eccentricity to out-and-out madness understandable to the reader.

 

And even though the two men come to constitute each other’s entire world, their relationship, too, remains oddly opaque: because Homer’s blindness never hobbled his life as a young man, his growing dependence on Langley feels hokey and contrived, as does his deference to Langley’s more and more antisocial behavior.”

 

I say: Read this book again, Ms. Kakutani. In fact, read your own review again: Isolation, retreat; stutters, stalls. You may still believe that the narrative fizzles out, but I think that Doctorow was actually attempting something stylistic by having his narrative stutter more and become increasingly stalled as the brothers’ hallways and rooms and very air sources become impossible to navigate.

 

Perhaps, too, an author whose narrator has vision challenges might want something to “remain opaque?”

 

At this point, I may sound as if I’m whining a bit. Kakutani is entitled to feel prose is “hokey and contrived.” But I worry that her rather cranky review will keep too many readers from even starting the book, and having the feelings about Doctorow’s prose that I did, which were: poetic and affecting.