Homer & Langley: A Novel

by E.L. Doctorow
Random House, 224 pp., $26

Doctorow likes to burrow into the headspace of major historical figures – the Rosenbergs in The Book of Daniel, Frank Sinatra in City of God – but for his 11th novel, he’s rummaged through the curiosity shop of Americana and come up with two of its dustiest, most befuddling objets, the real-life Fifth Avenue shut-ins the Collyer brothers. Langley is the elder brother: an atheist, an inventor, a conspiracy theorist, and a lung-scarred World War I veteran who reads aloud poetry to his blind younger brother, Homer. The mellifluous opening line of a W.H. Auden poem – “Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle …” – becomes something of a running joke between the Collyer brothers, and there’s irony there, in the name of the poem, “The Wanderer,” as the two men have been fixed in place for 50 years, holed up in their dead parents’ Central Park-adjacent brownstone while a half-century of American cultural history flies by them and occasionally bangs on the door, begging to be let in.

Homer, who narrates, is subject, and sometimes slave, to Langley’s projects and paranoias – schemes that tease the line between crackpot and prophet, as in his Theory of Replacements, in which he argues that everyone and everything is simply a substitute for what came before: Darwin for Genesis, this season’s top pitcher for last’s, a mistress for a wife for a first love. Homer’s first love is an orphaned Catholic girl named Mary Elizabeth, his assistant at a silent-movie theatre where he plays piano accompaniment. It’s a chaste unaffair, erotically powered by the feel of Mary Elizabeth’s whispers at his ear, as she describes the action of a Buster Keaton film. Homer’s sightlessness is essential to the way Doctorow evokes Homer’s world for the reader: In language perfectly metered and pitched, Doctorow, that king of the comma splice, drops sight out of the equation to achieve an uncommonly tactile effect.

Very little actually happens to the Collyer brothers, but Doctorow’s expansive, finely crafted novel is testament to the richnesses of an interior life, even as the exterior one becomes hermetically sealed. Homer & Langley is a work of unrushed and rattling beauty that ends, with an audible moan, in a tragedy that is foretold but no less tragic for its inevitability.

This article appears in September 18 • 2009.

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A graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Kimberley has written about film, books, and pop culture for The Austin Chronicle since 2000. She was named Editor of the Chronicle in 2016; she previously served as the paper’s Managing Editor, Screens Editor, Books Editor, and proofreader. Her work has been awarded by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia for excellence in arts criticism, team reporting, and special section (Best of Austin). The Austin Alliance for Women...