Homer & Langley
Doctorow, E.L.
Review by Shelley Huntington
When policemen exhumed the Collyer brothers in 1947, pulling their corpses out from under 100 tons of garbage stuffed inside the family’s dilapidated 5th Avenue townhouse,
cameras flashed and created an enduring urban legend. People have since puzzled, winced and wondered: How could these two educated men from an old affluent family have chosen to live in squalor? What pushed them to pile newspapers to the ceiling?
What turned them into mole-men tunneling through trash? What made them board up the windows and bolt the doors? Pleasure surfaces in imagining the unimaginable, in ogling the grotesque. We like to shake our heads at eccentricity grown wild like kudzu. Perhaps the Collyers continue to captivate not only because the bulging, broken house gave such physicality to their
condition, but also because the colossal clutter originated from a common problem. We all have junk drawers, after all. And closets that need culling. Doctorow’s fictionalized biography of the Collyers, told by brother Homer, focuses on their commonality, on what made them resemble most other Americans treading through the twentieth century, and retrieves their humanity from myth.
Homer opens the novel with a simple introduction: "I’m Homer, the blind brother." This informal salutation, this handshake, at once reveals the surprising candor,
clarity and good nature that will accompany readers as they wade into the brothers’ complicated histories. Homer relays the markers of the Collyer odyssey, always playing the straight-man
to Langley’s nutty professor, offering dead-pan commentary and an oddly satisfying, rationalized account of their incremental unraveling.
He tells us that the mountain of trash began as a molehill, a seedling theory in Langley’s brain, which grew and grew until it scraped the rafters. Langley returned from WWI
scarred by mustard gas and fixated on a "metaphysical sort of idea of the repetition or recurrence of life events, the same things happening over and over..." By collecting
and analyzing daily newspapers, he believed he could catalog enough duplication to draft one newspaper, a single edition, that will provide a reader with "a portrait in newsprint of our life on
earth." They’d never have to buy another newspaper again. Homer confides early on, "Langley would never complete his newspaper project. I knew that and I’m sure he knew that as well.
It was a crazy foolish hand-rubbing scheme," reducing the endeavor to a hobby that buoyed his brilliant brother and nothing more.
Langley collected other things too, of course: a Model T Ford (erected in the dining room), typewriters, pianos, candles, bicycles. But the odd, endless acquisitions filling the hallways
gradually cease to preoccupy the reader, just as the mounting mayhem eventually feels commonplace to the Collyers. Homer sighs and shuffles on, and we do too. Doctorow’s affable narrator
charms us and soon we share in his magical thinking, in his inert decision to accept the encroaching insanity, in his choice to love Langley. The filth falls away and the ways the brothers intersect
the outside world takes up greater space in this sympathetic, warm novel about misfits. In increasing isolation, the Collyers still enjoy serendipitous collisions with other Americans. They continue
to engage in seminal national moments even as societal drop-outs.
Some might snicker as the two march through the twentieth century to a peppy drumbeat, throwing tea dances during the Depression, hanging flags during WWII, protesting the internment of
their Japanese housekeepers, shaking their heads at Vietnam. Others might see frames from Forest Gump when the Collyers meet gangsters in speakeasys, watch the moon landing and hang with hippies.
They certainly hit every notch on the American time line. Doctorow, perhaps heavy-handedly, celebrates the persistent connectivity that defines the human experience, especially in the twenty-first
century. In the digital age, we ceaselessly bump up against one another; texts, cells, IMs, email, Facebook all string us together and sometimes serve as a lifeline. While the Collyers insulated themselves
from with world with piles of newsprint and obsolete objects, we cocoon ourselves in ever-mounting piles of digital stuff. Are we so different from them in our obsessive, daily Google searches, in perpetually
gathering, sifting and housing tons of information? Don’t we do this alone, behind our own drawn shades?
Behind the Collyer shutters, darkness begins to take hold during Homer’s final entries. He loses his hearing and writes to fill the muffled void. Langley sets intricate booby
traps, and a "strange strangled sound" comes from his throat in "his effort to not break down." Auden’s bleak poem "The Wanderer," serves as a touchstone for the
Collyers throughout their lives (Langley reads it to Homer soon after he goes blind), and in our last moments with the brothers the pathos of the first line reverberates; "Doom is darker and deeper than any sea dingle." Readers who seek out the entire poem find an excruciating portrayal of a man damned to constant migration, yearning for a home
and the people who wait for him there. In Doctorow’s fond imagining the Collyers miraculously retain both a home and a connection to others, even as they descend into deep, strange waters. His chilling ending reminds us of what can happen when you find yourself truly alone in this world.
Shelley Huntington reviews books for Kirkus Reviews and cares for her daughter, Ada,in Manhattan. Before becoming a mother, she worked as a librarian at The New York Public Library.