Homer and Langley
Brilliant brothers Langley and Homer Collyer are born into bourgeois New York comfort in settled times, their home a fin-de-siecle mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, their future rosy. But before he is out of his teens Homer begins to lose his sight, Langley returns from the War in Europe with his lungs seared by gas, and when the death of their parents in the influenza epidemic of 1918 leaves the brothers orphaned, they seem perilously ill-equipped to deal with the new era. Around Central Park carriages give way to motor cars, Prohibition to free love, but Homer and Langley adapt: their townhouse fills and empties and fills again, with servants, lodgers, tea-dancers and gangsters. They are mocked and spied on, embraced by hippies and besieged by bailiffs, but as the world turns ever more incomprehensible Homer and Langley hold fast to their principles of self-reliance, courage, kindness and love, and they endure.
3.7 out of 5 based on 11 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
224 |
| RRP |
£11.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-1408702154 |
| Publisher |
Little, Brown |
| |
Brilliant brothers Langley and Homer Collyer are born into bourgeois New York comfort in settled times, their home a fin-de-siecle mansion on upper Fifth Avenue, their future rosy. But before he is out of his teens Homer begins to lose his sight, Langley returns from the War in Europe with his lungs seared by gas, and when the death of their parents in the influenza epidemic of 1918 leaves the brothers orphaned, they seem perilously ill-equipped to deal with the new era. Around Central Park carriages give way to motor cars, Prohibition to free love, but Homer and Langley adapt: their townhouse fills and empties and fills again, with servants, lodgers, tea-dancers and gangsters. They are mocked and spied on, embraced by hippies and besieged by bailiffs, but as the world turns ever more incomprehensible Homer and Langley hold fast to their principles of self-reliance, courage, kindness and love, and they endure.
Read an extract on the New York Times website
Reviews
The Observer
Sarah Churchwell
"Homer comes to see their house as the demented museum it is, "although with our riches as yet uncatalogued, the curating still to come". The curating is, in effect, what Doctorow is offering: finding meaning amid the mess in the classic artistic impulse to create order from chaos. The cleverness of Doctorow's tactic is to let his story contract, rather than expand: this is a miniature epic of American derangement, the madness of our materialism, our sentimentality about our nation, our futile resistances and a haunting image of being buried alive under our own detritus."
24/01/2010
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The New York Times
Liesl Schillinger
"The achievement of Doctorow’s masterly, compassionate double portrait is that it succeeds for 200 pages in suspending the snigger, elevating the Collyers beyond caricature and turning them into creatures of their times instead of figures of fun."
08/09/2009
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The Independent
Robert Epstein
"Anyone seeking searing insight into what it means to live, and to have lived, through some of the most troubled periods of the past century and a half, should look to Doctorow's other novels: The March, Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks. But those who accept that a historical novel need not do more than paint a picture of its protagonists will find here the most exquisite writing, an extraordinary story and a charmingly wry take on life and all its inconveniences."
17/01/2010
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The New Statesman
Stephanie Hegarty
"[Langley's] fascination with invention, but abhorrence of the society that created it, suggests a critique of Americanism. But perhaps this is too deep a reading of what is essentially a sad and beautiful story of the love of two brothers rejected by the rest of the world."
21/01/2010
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The Guardian
Xan Brooks
"One might regard this as a novel of old age in which the Collyer mansion is installed as the physical embodiment of human consciousness; a vessel of memories that becomes congested and precarious as the years go by. By implication it could also represent America itself. Doctorow takes the great spread of 20th-century history and reduces it to a huddled mass of dusty souvenirs."
16/01/2010
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The Washington Post
Michael Dirda
"There's a briskness to "Homer & Langley" that never flags, and its solitary protagonists -- two lost souls -- possess a half-comical, half-nightmarish fascination. They seem, at once, symbols of both American materialism and of American loneliness."
03/09/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Benjamin Secher
"[An] enjoyable novel… His beautiful prose cannot disguise the fact that these figures are essentially fleshed-out clichés and caricatures, unsubtle heralds of the societal shifts taking place beyond the Collyers’ walls."
25/01/2010
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The Sunday Times
Phil Baker
"…this is a novel uncomfortably balanced between large literary resonances on the one hand and the more disturbing reality of the historical Collyer brothers on the other… The madness is missing from this version of the story, and what we have instead is an enjoyably kooky piece of big-hearted Americana about a couple of lovable oddballs."
17/01/2010
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The Los Angeles Times
David L. Ulin
"...as Doctorow himself has acknowledged, terrific writing is not enough. "I'll make a crude distinction here," he notes in his 2006 essay collection "Creationists," "between those writers who make their language visible, who draw attention to it in the act of writing and don't let us forget it ... from those magicians of the real who write to make their language invisible..." This, in the end, is the issue. Yes, "Homer & Langley" has its moments, but they are mostly abstract..."
30/08/2009
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The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
"Speaking directly to us in a slightly wistful voice, Homer is an engaging enough narrator, and his account of his and Langley’s earlier years can be poignant… But as the Collyers isolate themselves from the world and retreat to their monstrously overcluttered house, the narrative stutters and stalls. Mr. Doctorow never succeeds in making the brothers’ transition from mild eccentricity to out-and-out madness understandable to the reader."
31/08/2009
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The Spectator
Justin Cartwright
"[The plot] probably sounds quite interesting; the problem is with the writing… It is almost unbearable to wade through this kind of thing, as well as the vaguely philosophical and Pooterish observations for page after page while lamenting at the loss of Doctorow’s original talent… The last few chapters, particularly, have some fine moments, but this book is sad evidence that even great writers decline."
20/01/2010
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