Doctorow's Homer and Langley

I finished Doctorow's Homer and Langley last night. I wasn't intending to read a novel which would fit into our American Experience theme; it just happened. Since I've read almost everything Doctorow has written, I'd had this on my bedside table for a while. I guess I've grown increasingly frustrated with good old E.L. over the years and I wasn't particularly eager to start the book.

But then again, there is something strange and alluring about the real-life story the book is based on. The title refers to a pair of wealthy hoarders who lived in an expensive 5th Avenue brownstone. The brothers (one was blind) were hounded by the press and rock-throwing kids, and eventually died in their boarded-up mansion in 1947. More here at wikipedia.

Doctorow took the bare bones of this story and expanded on it, changing the birth order of the brothers and lengthening their lives to the 1970's. Certain elements of the real brothers' lives stayed the same (e.g., that Langley had attempted to use a Model T which he'd installed in the dining room to electrify the house once the power and gas had been shut off), but others Doctorow tinkered with to suit his own purposes. Homer, blind from adolescence on, narrates the story and he takes us through all of the changes and major events in US history in the 20th century, as seen by this musical (he plays his beloved Aeolian piano throughout the entire book, almost as a soundtrack to the action), lonely shut-in. Homer's highly dependent on Langley, for food, direction, and guidance (his older brother, though sighted, was injured in a mustard gas attack as a soldier in WWI). You get the feeling that Homer tolerates his brother's crazy hoarding and his attempts at creating an uber-newspaper, one that would show the incessant repeating patterns of history and society. They were both nuts.

Doctorow can be a wonderful writer but parts of the book were just sloppy. Since it is the first person narration of a blind man supposedly using a braille typewriter, how much can we attribute the mistakes in grammar and punctuation to that and how much can we attribute to Doctorow's editors' unwillingness to change anything of the master's? It doesn't matter. There were some scenes of beauty and poignance, like an early scene where Homer's 16 year old piano student describes what is happening on the screen to him so he can play along on the piano with the film (we're supposed to believe that he needed the job at a movie house). Or the clannish gathering of hippies inside their brownstone and the last supper they prepare for the brothers.

But those scenes of brilliance are few and far between as the reader seesaws between Langley's cynical, seen-it-all view of the world and Homer's blind tolerance. The book is not a masterpiece and is certainly redolent of other Doctorows, particularly Billy Bathgate, in which a gangster takes centerstage. This time, the gangster intuitively trusts the brothers, offering them prostitutes who arrive at midnight bearing champagne. The gangster reappears years later during the organized crime hearings of the late 50's and yet again one more time.

So...in essence, not a brilliant book, but certainly a Doctorow.