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to E. L. Doctorow discussing Homer & Langley on Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm podcast, 8/13/09. |
Intimate, Funny, Personal & Haunting
Inspired by the True Story of the
Eccentric Collyer Brothers
Inspired by the notorious true story of the Collyer brothers—famous for their compulsive hoarding and their obsessive fear of throwing anything away—Homer & Langley spans the better part of 20th-century America and all the changes that came along—but entirely from the perspective of one peculiar household.
While holed up with his eccentric brother, Langley, in their cluttered four-story mansion on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, Homer Collyer reflects on his life: “Naturally I didn’t understand it as such, but this time marked the beginning of our abandonment of the outer world.” Homer is blind and deeply intuitive, white his brother Langley has been damaged into madness— or is it genius?—by mustard gas in World War I. Although housebound, they live out an ever-evolving odyssey that begins in the early part of the 20th century and extends to a time not so far from our own.
As the Collyer brothers hunker down in their once-grand townhouse and try to shut out the world, American characters through the decades exit and enter their abode—immigrants, prostitutes, jazz musicians, high-society women, government agents, gangsters, hippies—and incidents unfold: imperceptible courtships, political movements, wars, technological achievements. But do events and people really change, or only repeat in new guises? Langley’s master project is to collect the daily papers—gathering them in increasingly enormous stacks throughout the household—and to cull them for the seminal events that will make up his own ultimate, eternally up-to-date newspaper. Home asks, “Will it be a history of the familiar past or a prophecy of the unavoidable future?”
Inspired by the True Story of the
Eccentric Collyer Brothers
Inspired by the notorious true story of the Collyer brothers—famous for their compulsive hoarding and their obsessive fear of throwing anything away—Homer & Langley spans the better part of 20th-century America and all the changes that came along—but entirely from the perspective of one peculiar household.
While holed up with his eccentric brother, Langley, in their cluttered four-story mansion on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, Homer Collyer reflects on his life: “Naturally I didn’t understand it as such, but this time marked the beginning of our abandonment of the outer world.” Homer is blind and deeply intuitive, white his brother Langley has been damaged into madness— or is it genius?—by mustard gas in World War I. Although housebound, they live out an ever-evolving odyssey that begins in the early part of the 20th century and extends to a time not so far from our own.
As the Collyer brothers hunker down in their once-grand townhouse and try to shut out the world, American characters through the decades exit and enter their abode—immigrants, prostitutes, jazz musicians, high-society women, government agents, gangsters, hippies—and incidents unfold: imperceptible courtships, political movements, wars, technological achievements. But do events and people really change, or only repeat in new guises? Langley’s master project is to collect the daily papers—gathering them in increasingly enormous stacks throughout the household—and to cull them for the seminal events that will make up his own ultimate, eternally up-to-date newspaper. Home asks, “Will it be a history of the familiar past or a prophecy of the unavoidable future?”
Homer & Langley is an unforgettable work that slyly comments on our modern consumerism and the death of print media. Like the household of the two indelible main characters—brimming with newspapers, books, furniture, musical instruments, and booby traps—this mesmerizing and elegant new novel contains an entire country within.
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