|
|
|||||
 |
|||||
 |
|||||
|
Pack rats on a grand scale, the Collyer brothers made news in 1947 when they were found dead by a policeman who broke into their New York house after neighbors smelled a stench coming from it. The corpses were surrounded by more than 100 tons of rubbish they had collected—newspapers, furniture, 14 pianos, even an intact Model T. From these facts—along with a few factual liberties—E. L. Doctorow has fashioned a moving novel of obsession, filial love, and the darker side of the American Century. As described by the younger brother, Homer, the Collyers seem normal—until they bump up against the world. In this excerpt, they begin hosting tea dances, with disastrous results.
"These eccentric siblings provide the story he builds on, changes a bit and ultimately transforms into a stately,
beautiful performance with great resonance within the narrow range of their apartment—bound lives... the novel
offers a wide embrace of culture and civilization. What makes this novel so striking is that it joins both blindness
and insight, the sensual world and the world of the mind, to tell a story about the unfolding of modern American life
that we have never heard in exactly this (austere and lovely) way before."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"Our laureate of historical fiction, E.L. Doctorow, has recycled their story as a beautiful and haunting novel... an elegant parable of American consumerism—Doctorow's writing is so lithe, the book easily sustains all of its thematic musings."
—Boston Globe
"The humanization of the Collyer brothers has been a long time coming, and now it arrives in admirable form with E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley—we quickly realize that Homer Collyer is Mr. Doctorow's bard of bards, a modern Homer taking us on a wondrous odyssey that is in part a meditation on language itself... [a] whiplash use of language, a daring, poetic meditation in prose of the kind that is familiar from his earlier novels."
—Wall Street Journal
"A masterpiece that is at once comic, allegorical, and prescient."
—St. Louis Post Dispatch
"Doctorow did, in fact, make some important changes in the "real" story. He improved upon it. He made the novel not just a story about the poignant relationship between two brothers but also a commentary on war and peace, politics, newspapers, television, and the '60s—Doctorow is a master artist, right from the poignant first page."
—Providence Journal
"Resonates with haunting eloquence... an intriguing character study and an elegantly written exploration of isolation... Doctorow's great success here is in reaching past the joke to make us feel his anguish."
—Miami Herald
"Doctorow's Homer and Langley appropriates this story's mythic overtones, transforming them into triumphant art."
—Newsday
"A kaleidoscopic trip through 20th-century America. It's a wild ride... Throughout this new novel, we are diverted by the inimitable Doctorow mix of social history and pop culture from the end of the Victorian Age to the frenetic 1980s slyly inventive, uproariously engaging new novel."
—NPR.org "Books We Like"
"Imaginative... It's Mr. Doctorow's knack to concoct stories of an American long gone by but connect so much of them with current social trends... The author gives a measured dignity to his main characters."
—Washington Times
"Cunningly panoramic... Doctorow has packed this tale with episodes of existential wonder that capture the brothers in all their fascinating wackiness."
—Elle
"Doctorow paints on a sweeping historical canvas, imagining the Collyer brothers as witness to the aspirations and transgressions of 20th—century America; yet this book's most powerfully moving moments are the quiet ones, when the brothers relish a breath of cool morning air, and each other's tragically exclusive company."
—O, The Oprah Magazine
"Affecting... the two men's strange combination of naivetè and worldliness is rendered as gently and tragically beautiful. By its conclusion, Homer & Langley proves to be a powerful study in how living on society's margins can provide remarkable insights into what happens at its center."
—People
"Doctorow's gently luminous novel, Homer & Langley, breathes new life into the story, endowing the brothers' seemingly inexplicable actions with a hallucinatory, indigenous American logic."
—The Forward
"Homer & Langley offers tantalizingly intellectual musings on everything from love to personal freedoms—piercing insight, intense melancholy, and exquisite description."
—San Antonio Express—News
"The gracefully turns recluses into historical witnesses... the brothers spring to life, self-reliant misfits who would contend they're not much crazier than the world outside... It's a bittersweet love story of brothers who understand each other, even if no one else does... there's much music and thinking to be found in Homer & Langley."
—USA Today
"Doctorow again creatively reconfigures and amplifies the historical record... Doctorow's novel provides— in outline form— a comparable Platonic overview of American life in the 20th century."
—Washington Post
"Homer & Langley is one of his finest... Doctorow uses this timeline for a number of wonderful set pieces... Through all of this you have Mr. Doctorow's highly tuned, beautifully controlled language... wonderfully rendered."
—East Hampton Star
"In Doctorow's telling, the complaint gathers an elegiac force that goes beyond simple nostalgia. This is Forrest Gump by way of Ecclesiastes, a sustained lament over the futility of human endeavor."
—Esquire
"Doctorow works his usual magic in bringing history to life and larding it with disturbing implications... As with much of Doctorow's masterful fiction, Homer & Langley turns the American dream on its ear, offering us a glimpse of the dark side of our national—and personal—eccentricities."
—BookPage
"A tender and somber story of brothers being each other's keepers."
—Chicago Tribune
"Following the panoramic scope of The March, Doctorow creates a microcosmic and mythic tale of compulsion, alienation, and dark metamorphosis inspired by the famously eccentric Collyer brothers of New York City... Doctorow has Homer, who is blind, narrate with deadpan humor and spellbinding precision... Over the decades, people come and go... lovers, a gangster, a jazz musician, a flock of hippies, but finally Homer and Langley are irrevocably alone, prisoners in their fortress of rubbish, trapped in their warped form of brotherly love. Wizardly Doctorow presents an ingenious, haunting odyssey that unfolds within a labyrinth built out of the detritus of war and excess."
—Booklist★starred review ★
"A sweeping masterpiece about the infamous New York hermits, the Collyer brothers... Occasionally, outsiders wander through the house, exposing it as a living museum of artifacts, Americana, obscurity and simmering madness. Doctorow's achievement is in not undermining the dignity of two brothers who share a lush landscape built on imagination and incapacities. It's a feat of distillation, vision and sympathy."
—Publishers Weekly ★starred review ★
Excerpted from Homer & Langley by E. L. Doctorow Copyright © 2009 by E.L. Doctorow. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. |
|||||