From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel,
World’s Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow
comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern
American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master
novelist has once again created an unforgettable work.
Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers–the one blind and
deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or
perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They
live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion,
scavenging the city streets for things they think they can
use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for
Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will
be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out
in the lives of the two brothers–wars, political movements,
technological advances–and even though they want nothing
more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass
through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants,
prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters,
jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught
with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create
meaning for themselves.
Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously written, this mesmerizing
narrative, a free imaginative rendering of the lives of New
York’s fabled Collyer brothers, is a family story with the
resonance of myth, an astonishing masterwork unlike any
that have come before from this great writer.