After penning modern literary classics - Welcome to Hard Times, Ragtime, Loon Lake and Billy Bathgate – over three decades, E. L. Doctorow retreated to rather obscure novels about the city of Albany in New York State. I for one nearly abandoned him. Last year he made a triumphant return with The March, a riveting account of Sherman’s Civil War exploits. Now Homer and Langley tackles a byline of New York history, two brothers from an affluent family with a brownstone in Fifth Avenue who gradually opt out of ordinary life and fill their house with junk, eventually dying unnoticed.
My own nostalgia for New York instantly turned Doctorow’s novel evocative. I spent time there in the early 1990s and used to jog up Fifth Avenue alongside Central Park, which figures strongly in Homer and Langley. The front cover of my edition is a shot from an iced-up winter park scene towards Fifth Avenue, including the famous Plaza Hotel, quite recognisable to me from those days.
This front cover is blackened outside a circle, as if through a telescope, as if from the imagination of Homer, the brother whom Doctorow introduces in the book’s first lines thus: ‘I’m Homer, the blind brother. I didn’t lose my sight all at once, it was like the movies, a slow fade-out.’ The novel is told in Homer’s matter-of-fact tone, interspersed with heartbreaking feelings of aloneness. Older brother Langley returns from the hellish trenches of World War I Europe a philosophically bleak man, and when both parents succumb to the Spanish Flu epidemic, bitter, eccentric Langley slowly but surely guides blind Homer into a solipsistic world of mad collecting and retreat inside their home. I’ve always been fascinated by people who collect newspapers in piles, and Langley is one such, filling up the massive rooms and long corridors of the mansion, and the novel covers his outlandish gleaning from the New York streets – everything up to a Model T Ford set down in the dining room.
Yet neither brother is portrayed in Homer and Langley as a nutcase. Instead, Homer describes their life as elegiac, full of brotherly love and adventure and a kind of peace. Doctorow populates their decades of exodus from society – they end up in constant battles with neighbours, the municipality and utilities – with Italian hoods, dreamy hippies, and lodgers, turning their journey into one through a half century of American history. Homer’s search for love buttresses and frames the entire novel. The writing is gentle, reflective and brilliantly evocative.
A magisterial literary creation, Homer and Langley takes obscure lives and renders them luminescent. Well worth a read.