'Homer & Langley': Claustrophobic clutter in Manhattan

"Homer & Langley"

by E.L. Doctorow

Random House, 224 pp., $26

E.L. Doctorow's stories, like his 1974 breakthrough novel "Ragtime," often concern themselves with the exploits of outsiders, people who have been marginalized or who knowingly defy society's conventions in some way.

His latest novel, "Homer & Langley," pushes this idea to its extreme as it re-imagines the decades-long decline and fall of the real-life Collyer brothers, who famously became hermits in their family's Fifth Avenue town house in Harlem in the first half of the 20th century.

Homer, a talented pianist who loses his vision early in life, and Langley, a once-strapping, now coarse and paranoid World War I vet, make for an oddly codependent duo. Their parents, including a doctor father who shelved jars of pickled fetuses and organs in his study, die of Spanish Flu when the two are young men, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Homer, our sightless, wryly funny narrator, retreats into music and an unquenchable longing for the perfect woman. Langley, torn apart emotionally by his war experience, obsessively hoards random objects inside the house and reads newspapers with hopes of one day making the daily press obsolete. By studying articles, he hopes to compile a definitive, single-edition, perpetually current newspaper chronicling the universal joys and pains, achievements and follies of humanity.

The only thing perpetual about this household, however, is the buildup of clutter, in rooms and in the minds of its occupants. They create an interior world stockpiled with decades of detritus from the exterior world, including an old Model-T Ford that Langley reassembles in the dining room.

The Collyers are true eccentrics. To the manor born, they ironically seem most alive when sticking it to The Man. Worth a fortune, they don't pay their bills on time or at all, they let their house fall into a shambles, and when they do socialize, they associate with people who'd never be accepted in proper society, such as an initially friendly gangster named Vincent.

Yet when they host illegal "tea dances" for strangers during the age of swing and harbor pot-smoking hippies during the Age of Aquarius, the brothers experience flashes of genuine belonging. It's touching to see them in their social element. But the good times never last long.

As the book moves along, it grows darker, more littered and more menacing. Homer's collection of anecdotes induces a kind of claustrophobia. There's a powerful sense that all those towers of newspapers Langley has stacked are poised to tumble on us, the readers. It's a powerful narrative trick by Doctorow, a writer of silken elegance, but to what end?

If Doctorow wants us to walk away from this time-traveling embellishment of true historical events with a more nuanced view of the human condition, much as "Grey Gardens," the similarly themed 1975 film documentary about upper-crust decay does, then he hasn't quite succeeded.

The gloom in this book, though it reflects the tragedy of the brothers' actual lives, should not be an end unto itself. As Homer points out, his barricaded isolation has left him with only his consciousness, his inner reality, as company.

"The world has shuttered slowly closed," he laments, as his hearing fails too.

That's no way to live, no matter what kind of Emersonian pretensions of self-reliance the bitter and clearly disturbed Langley embraces. Homer and Langley need some light in their lives, the physical kind as well as the mental kind, to restore their faith. As readers of their chronicles, we do too.