A Book A Week - Week 13: Homer & Langley

This week's book:
    Homer & Langley    by  E.L. Doctorow

Grade:    B 

Sorry, I'm a day late with this.  Easter.  And being lazy.

I didn't quite know what to expect, I haven't read any of E.L. Doctorow's work before, and this is one of his later efforts.  I did like it, but... I don't know...
   A few years ago I went to a staging of an unreleased Tennessee Williams play.  I forget the name, but it was not 'Streetcar' or 'Menagerie' or any of the others he's famous for.  This one never made the cut.  Someone had secured the rights to the play and found a willing director and talented cast, and bada-bing, bada-boom, a new work by Tennessee Williams.  I sat through it, and I loved the actors, they were great, but the material left me cold.  I loved the work, but I hated the play.  That's kind of what's happened with me and this book.

The story is, at first blush, the story of two Manhattan brothers as they live across the 20th Century.  The younger brother, Homer, goes blind early in life, and has to depend on his older brother, who comes back from World War I a shattered man with a weak grasp on sanity.  The story's kind of like Forrest Gump, in that the two brothers live through most of the decades of the 20th Century as events swirl around them.  As things change over the years the brothers become increasingly isolated - they're hoarders - and Langley, the soldier, grows crazier and crazier.

I loved the writing, but I did not love the story.  It was a pleasant read, very easy and effortless, no tortured metaphors, no cardboard characters, no cliche situations.  But the message... I think the author veers into heavy-handed symbolism with the brothers and their rat-trap prison of a house.  Langley's decline parallels the decline of America, at least as I think the author sees it.  The actual Collyer brothers* died in 1947 amid the squalor of their hoarding, but in his fiction Doctorow extends their lives into the 1980's, and that's not just for the sake of imagining what their lives would have been like.  The brothers are relics of the 19th Century, a more genteel time the author romanticizes in the first chapters.  The Great War changes everything, not just for Langley but also for America, and Langley's descent into madness and hoarding parallels the country's loss of its morals and guiding principals and its increasing preoccupation with buying and keeping stuff.  Langley represents materialism run amok, and Homer, in his blindness and increasing deafness, represents the American public's willing participation in its own decline.

I don't think I'm reading too much into this, Doctorow is an accomplished novelist more than up to the task.  I do think this metaphor and symbolism is what he intended, I just didn't care for it.  It seems to me almost a cranky old man's rant, 'things were better back then.'  Except things weren't better, they were just different.

I would absolutely recommend this book to a friend, especially someone of a more-literary bent.  I'll also probably go read some of his earlier work, outside of my Book-a-Week effort.

* yes, they were real people

Next week:
   Slam    by  Nick Hornby
   He's the 'maestro of the male confessional,' evidently.  I'll read it anyway.