The Odd Couple By LIESL SHILLINGER

The Odd Couple By LIESL SHILLINGER
September 13, 2009

HOMER & LANGLEY
By E. L. Doctorow
208 pp. Random House. $26

The subject of E. L. Doctorow's gentle, enveloping new novel, “Homer & Langley,” is one that might easily come to any deskbound writer who spends his days amid mounting piles of books, newspapers and magazines. It’s the Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley — wealthy, reclusive Manhattan pack rats who lived for decades in squalor in a Fifth Avenue brownstone and died within a labyrinth of trash: towers of news­papers, battlements of books, mountains of boxes and heaps of chandeliers and debris (human organs in brine, pianos, a Model T Ford). After their deaths, in 1947, investigators had to break an upstairs window to gain entrance. Burrowing through walls of clutter, they soon found Homer’s body, but it took weeks to locate Langley’s, which lay within 10 feet of his brother’s, crushed beneath a booby trap he’d set for prowlers. After both Collyers were extracted, more than 100 tons of refuse was removed from the building.
Though their story is entirely true, the Collyers have become the stuff of urban legend; as such, they’ve inspired many commemorations before this one. A few years ago, Franz Lidz wrote a riveting, fact-filled nonfiction account of the brothers, “Ghosty Men,” interwoven with reminiscences of his uncle (also a compulsive hoarder). In 1954, the impetuous writer and critic Marcia Davenport (she titled her autobiography “Too Strong for Fantasy”) mined their biography for melodrama in her novel “My Brother’s Keeper,” in which a passionate opera singer drives two brothers to disposophobic lunacy. The peculiar pair have also popped up, by name or reputation, in plays, television shows and films, as well as in the horror and crime genre — from Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot,” in 1975, to Linda Fairstein's “Lethal Legacy,” published last February.
But Doctorow considers the Collyers in a less lurid fashion, casting them as sympathetic, if eccentric, players in the drama of the departed American century — sepia-tone figures in an elegiac zoetrope. Where other writers, titillated by the brothers’ ghoulish history, have asked, “How did they die?,” Doctorow asks the more respectful, and thus more surprising, question: “How did they live?” Reaching back to their Gilded Age beginnings and extending their life span into the 1980s, he resurrects 10 decades through the brothers’ imagined experience — matching the accumulation of junk within the Collyer home with the accumulation of epochal events in the world outside their walls.
At the fin de siècle, child Homer stands on a city pier, holding his nursemaid’s hand, waving at his well-upholstered parents as they sail for Europe on a grand ocean liner. World War I musters Langley to France, where he’s gassed but survives, while back at home his parents succumb to the Spanish Flu. During the Great Depression, the orphans host public dances in their mansion (the world-whipped patrons “shuffled about with a sinuous somnolent shushing”), and during World War II their Japanese-American housekeepers are hauled off to an internment camp by the F.B.I. — “something that might seem momentous and horrifying to the people they have come for but is mere routine for them,” Homer sorrowfully reflects. Fast-forward to the moon landing and beyond, and the brothers open their “pad” to childlike hippies they meet at an anti-Vietnam War rally in Central Park — women in fringed jackets and beaded headbands, and an R. Crumb -like cartoonist who draws “comic strips in which men’s feet and women’s breasts and behinds were greatly exaggerated.”
Mercifully, Doctorow’s Collyers are much more than a couple of Zeligs with O.C.D. These happenings unfurl not in herky-jerky newsreel fashion but slowly, in a stately, careful retelling by Homer Collyer, who is blind. Homer can sense, but not see, the transformations going on around him. Because of his affliction, and because of his dependence on his brother, his recollections carry special weight, poignance and, sometimes, humor. When the cops raid one of the Collyers’ dances, Homer instinctively takes a swing at the intruders, “like the swat of a bear’s paw but something lazier,” and gets a clout to the solar plexus that sends him gasping to the floor. “He’s blind, you idiot,” Langley shouts. “And so ended the weekly tea dance,” Homer somberly concludes.
When the family cook objects to Langley’s installation of a Model T in the dining room, Homer scolds her: “My brother is a brilliant man. There is some intelligent purpose behind this, I can assure you,” then confides to the reader, “At that moment of course I hadn’t the remotest idea of what it might be.” The world may see Langley Collyer as an erratic loon with wild eyes and Einstein hair, but to Homer he’s a man of ideas, a caretaker, a brother. Langley consolingly urges him not to regret his blindness too much. “There is endless debate as to whether we see the real world or only the world as it appears in our minds,” he explains. “It’s not just your problem.”
Increasingly, however, Langley is just Homer’s problem. Blind and eventually deaf, trapped by impassable hedgerows he can’t see, Homer is left with “only the touch of my brother’s hand to know that I am not alone,” and with only his diary to confide in: “I am grateful to have this typewriter, and the reams of paper beside my chair, as the world has shuttered slowly closed, intending to leave me only my consciousness.” When Langley begins stockpiling newspapers, Homer earns the reader’s sympathy as he seeks a logical justification for his brother’s mania. Langley has come up with a “Theory of Replacements,” Homer explains: “Every­thing in life gets replaced. We are our parents’ replacements just as they were replacements of the previous generation.” Time, Langley has told him, “advances through us as we replace ourselves to fill the slots,” and this theory has spurred him to conceive an “ultimate newspaper” containing slots for every kind of human event, for which the stockpiled documents will serve as backup. Langley’s goal is to “fix American life finally in one edition,” to create an “eternally current dateless newspaper.”
Had Langley come of age in the Internet era, the masses of documents he hoarded could have been replaced by a two-pound laptop, depriving New York of one of its most resonant cautionary tales. Instead, floor-to-ceiling bundles of newspapers become his hard drive, holding his “murder of innocents” file (the Birmingham church bombing of 1963, the Kent State shootings of 1970, the killing of nuns in El Salvador in 1980); his “political assassinations” file (John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy); and his fledgling “presidential malfeasance” file (the first entry is Watergate). Doctorow’s examples remind readers that any person in the present day who undertook such a project would soon find himself similarly immured. Then again, who but a Langley Collyer would bother?
When Homer hears of a newspaper photo­graph of Langley “shuffling down Fifth Avenue in a porkpie hat, a ragged coat down to his ankles, a shawl he’d made from a burlap sack, and house slippers,” he knows his brother’s sanity has taken a nose dive but blames it on civic outrage. “I will say in my brother’s defense that he had a lot on his mind. It was a period of appalling human behavior.”
Of course, if disturbing headlines were enough to justify such a reaction, there would be what the police call a “Collyer situation” on every city block. When Homer, in a bid for empathy, asks, “What could be more terrible than being turned into a mythic joke?” readers caught up in Doctorow’s tender, lushly drawn narrative may feel a pang, remembering Langley’s Theory of Replacements and wondering what slot history has in store for them. Yet after the novel’s spell ebbs, they will probably, guiltily, revert to the more instinctive response to Homer’s plea. What’s worse than being turned into a joke? Dying in your house buried under 100 tons of trash. 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.h

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review

Review.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/books/review/Schillinger-t.html