When John Updike died last year, various critics suggested that Philip Roth was the last remaining of the great American novelists. Even at the time, this was hard to take at face value. It seemed nothing more than a kneejerk reaction from the same critics whose glowing reviews of Roth’s annual postings from the frontiers of fading testosterone blithely ignore the increasingly lacklustre prose within. As if in rejoinder to such claims of Roth’s pre-eminence, other writers have thrust their hats firmly into the ring. To focus only on white males of a certain age, Thomas Pynchon produced the effervescent Inherent Vice, Don DeLillo has a new novel imminent, Point Omega, and now E.L. Doctorow has published Homer and Langley.
Homer and Langley is Doctorow’s thirteenth novel. While it may not display the same level of formal experimentation as works like The Book of Daniel and, more recently, City of God, it is still a surprising and ambitious work in several ways. Loosely based on the historical figures of the Collyer brothers, New York eccentrics who hoarded everything they could lay their hands on and eventually perished beneath the accumulated junk, the first surprise of Homer and Langley is its scope. If Doctorow’s previous novel, The March, viewed the brief period of Sherman’s march on the South through a telescope, creating a large, multi-people canvas of the Civil War, in Homer and Langley, Doctorow appears to have switched the telescope around. Instead of a concentrated period of history, we get a sweep through the best part of the century, taking in the Great War, the Depression, World War Two, and Vietnam with its attendant hippies. However, with the book weighing in at only 208 pages, such a vast panorama comes at a price. Characterisation of secondary characters rarely rises above the level of sketches and vague outlines. The hippies who flit into the narrative are cartoonish figures – the girls in thin, floaty dresses and the men with beards and sandals – while every woman Homer, the narrator, falls in love with struggles to be real.
Another surprise is in the choice of the narrator. Eschewing the multiple narrators of his recent novels, and the fractured first persons of The book of Daniel and Loon Lake, Doctorow provides his most consistently voiced first person narrative since Billy Bathgate. But quite shockingly for a writer as capable as Doctorow of evoking the visual, the narrator he chooses is ‘the blind brother’, Homer not Langley. Perhaps the correlation between Homer and the blind Greek poet was too great a temptation for Doctorow’s love of allusion to overcome, but the results are interesting. Because despite occasional moments when the writing feels like Doctorow is responding to a creative writing class challenge to describe objects without referring to their appearance, the stratagem generally works. Its overall effect is to draw the reader into a world of sound and force us to reflect on the power of words to evoke a world to which history has effectively blinded us. If we can see the past, it is only like a blind man sees: doomed to touch and fumble, and to recreate an approximation within our own minds.
Reduced to relying on his brother for protection once their parents die, Homer experiences the world secondhand, constantly reliant on the newspaper reports his brother reads to him. Fortunately for Homer, Langley takes every newspaper in New York in every edition possible. For like Billy Bathgate, Langley is obsessed with newspapers and their power to report the world. But where Billy treats the news with wide-eyed innocence, Langley sees it as confirmation of his theory of replacements, a variant of Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return. Langley’s never-realized project is to create an eternally relevant newspaper, a totalization of news stories that will confirm that somewhere there is a war, a natural disaster, a celebrity marriage etc.
While these events are going on in the world outside, there is little in the way of plot happening in the Collyer household. Langley grows more and more eccentric. His hoarding brings everything from a Model T Ford to a stockpile of army surplus jackets to the house. They pass the Depression as friends of a gangster, and then are introduced to jazz by their cook’s grandson. Homer’s true love leaves to become a nun. He grows older and worries about encroaching deafness.The city grows interested in their eccentricity, and Langley slowly cuts all ties with the utility companies and the bank, the latter by paying the remainder of the mortgage in cash.
This may all seem relentlessly domestic and largely divorced from Doctorow’s usual concerns of interrogating the present through a distorted mirror of the past. Yet as the novel progresses, there is something in the images of corrupt officialdom, rapacious bankers and a society enthralled by consumerism and celebrity that strikes a note of undoubted contemporaneity.
Everything that Langley collects is a consumer item that someone else has rejected, its use superseded by another object whose purchase will sustain capitalism further. Even the newspapers fall into this cycle of easy expendability. So rather than being just a simple tale of eccentrics, the book’s final surprise is its subtle but withering critique of the credit crunch age. To a world still reeling from the effects of fictitious capital gone wrong, Doctorow offers the Collyer brothers and their trash-engulfed house as a kind of postmodern museum that brings all values into question save that of love and friendship. The tragedy, of course, is that we know that neither of these positive forces will prove enough. We read the novel fully aware that, like the actual Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley too must die. In an echo of Blue, narrator of Doctorow’s first novel Welcome to Hard Times, Homer is clearly close to death when typing his story. And as in Blue’s tale, the insights he offers seem all the more urgent and sharp for it.
Doctorow does not, fortunately, suffer from Homer’s blindness. Homer and Langley is as clear-sighted about the predicament of modern America as any of his previous novels, and confirms his position as one of its finest and bravest artists. If the almost mythical beast of the great American novelist does indeed continue to exist, Roth’s is not the only face it might wear.