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Hoarding history

October 16th, 2009 Lesley - Central

E.L. Doctorow returns to New York City in his latest book Homer and Langley.  The title characters are based on New York’s eccentric siblings Homer and Langley Collyer who lived in their parent’s Fifth Avenue mansion for years while collecting and storing enough items to fill the several floors of the building.

Doctorow’s Homer and Langley started life as the privileged children of a physician and his socialite wife.  However several profound events occurred in both brother’s lives as young men.  Langley, a Columbia University student, joined the military during World War I and became a victim of mustard gas and shell shock.  Meanwhile Homer, who had been gradually losing his sight for years, eventually became completely blind.  Adding to the brothers’ misfortune, was the death of both their parents during the Spanish Influenza epidemic in 1918.

Soon after returning to his Fifth Avenue residence following the war, Langley began roaming the city streets daily looking for items to collect.  In the meantime Homer, the narrator of the story, spent most of his time playing the family piano.  Eventually their home contained a Model T Ford set up in the dining room, a Chinese bronze horse, machinery of all types and sizes as well as stacks of the many daily newspapers published in New York City.  All that hoarding aside, Homer and Langley become witnesses to the changes in American society over the course of their lives.

While I enjoyed reading this book that was on my “don’t miss” list for the fall, I had  problems with its basic structure.  Homer (1881-1947) and Langley Collyer (1885-1947) were real brothers who did live in a Fifth Avenue mansion and became known as eccentric hoarders by the time of their deaths.  While Doctorow’s novel used their real names and several  basic facts, he moved their lives ahead almost 15 years and made other changes which I found distracting and difficult to reconcile with the real lives of his characters.

As a reader of historical novels, I would have preferred different names for the brothers while still following the general outline of their lives.  That way, the author could have told the story and describe events during the 20th century without confusing the reader.  In Doctorow’s book this confusion distracted from what was otherwise an interesting and entertaining view of two unique characters in history.

Entry Filed under: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction