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Homer Y Langley (2010)

by E.L. Doctorow(Favorite Author)

3.54 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

8493722871 (ISBN13: 9788493722876)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Miscelánea

review 1: Not only did I absolutely adore this book, I had the profound privilege of meeting Mr. Doctorow at the 2014 National Book Festival gala. So I was able to tell him just how much I learned about our senses and how they expand our experience from how he described Homer's ways of dealing with his blindness. The ending is surely the most shocking I have ever read, and the experience held through numerous re-readings. My book club read the book and I learned I was not the only reader to shout out loud at the final paragraph. Only a master of literature could create such a masterpiece.Thank you, E. L. Doctorow, for writing this book. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me ten minutes of your time to talk about your books. I am so grateful for the journey that b... morerought you from the Washington Avenue library in New York to the Library of Congress.
review 2: E.L takes poetic license with his historical fiction. My Homburg goes off to him. I latched onto Homer & Langley after reading a few books on collecting, most notably Mint Condition by Dave Jamieson. As you may already be familiar, Homer & Langley is based upon the eccentric Collyer brothers who were notorious for their hoarding. They had bales of newspapers stacked higgledy-piggledy throughout their townhouse. They had booby traps aplenty and kept a Ford Model T in the dining room under a dusty chandelier. Pickled human fetuses soaked in jars, and they also collected gas masks, numerous flowerpots from their mother’s botany experiments, random piano pieces, scattered car parts, baby carriages, etc. The bales of newspapers were the most prized of their possessions. Apparently, Langley was hellbent on producing one ginormous newspaper of everything that could possibly happen. He wanted to chart mankind’s potential. While Homer and Langley make interesting specimens, there’s little in the way of story. Some reviewers have called it an old man’s rant. I wouldn’t go that far, but there is very little arc to this novel. I can see readers either really digging it or tossing it under the radiator. The lion’s share of Homer & Langley is told in either half-scenes or else summarized. This style is befitting of an old man looking back on his life, but considering it’s such a skimpy book, covering a broad swath of time, it may come off as primi piatti rather than secondi piatti. If you’re fine with mushroom ravioli you’ll be satisfied.The best parts are the snippets where Langley snaps at Homer or, for example, when the brothers yell at the contestants on a Quiz Show who bumble the right answers. “Herodotus, you idiot” (Who was the first historian?). Too many bit players traipse in and out without being developed. Now this may add to the breezy pace of the storytelling, but it undermines the story. There are big opportunities to make more of the Japanese couple, hiding in the Collyers abode. Ditto for the hippies toward the end. The minute you are getting into a new interloper they are poof gone.The big scene with Vincent and his gangsters that are holding the brothers is both jarring and corny. Clearly, it is meant to liven things up. The real meat happens after the gangster vamoosh. Langley shares a great revelation while tied to the back of his brother. He tells Homer about a Christian resort they used to go to when they were kids. “You couldn’t walk a few steps without being greeted with big smiles. And I tell you, I had never in my young life been so terrified.” Langley admits that from that point onward he would go out of his way to avoid the heavenly path. “To be a man in this world is to face the hard real life of awful circumstances, to know there is only life and death and such varieties of human torment as to confound any such personage as God.” The last chance for deeper meaning tails toward the end when Homer encounters Jacqueline Roux, a French journalist. She doesn’t just bring a fresh whiff of possibility, she saves Homer from getting crushed by a car. You are certain that Jacqueline will add a new layer, but though she offers lively banter, she is only there for a brief moment. Months pass and Homer still recalls her fondly. She has become an “exotic accident” in his life. By this point, the weather-beaten Homer may have imagined her slipping into his life. Real or imagined, Jacqueline Roux is symbolic of an ideal the romantic Homer has always been enamored with. As a young pianist, wearing his hair like Franz Liszt, he had had chances to consummate his desires, but only for a few fleeting moments. Langley was always by his side, his companion, his thorn, his anchor. Runaway romantics beware. Though our probing narrator strives in earnest to grapple with a Platonic understanding of the particulars and the universals, the ideals seem impossible to reach. Homer and Langley is a work of heightened rumination. less

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