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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
I first learned of Doctorow's masterpiece, Homer & Langley, through a piece written in Esquire entitled "Two Great New Books on a New Kind of Apocalypse." The review covered both Doctorow's novel and Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem, stating:
It is in these circumstances that we find the Collyer brothers as Homer pounds away at the Braille typewriter Langley obtained for him, chronicling the story of their lives. Here are two men who have been through it all. Older brother Langley was returned back from the Great War as damaged goods only to learn that their parents had died during his abscence and his younger brother has taken up with a thieving maid. As the world ended for them, their lives continued on as relics from the past.
Both novels make a reader ache for a city long gone. But they also let us know that the end of the world as we know it may only be the end of the world as we know it. What's truly scary is not that life will end but that it will continue in ever reduced circumstances.
It is in these circumstances that we find the Collyer brothers as Homer pounds away at the Braille typewriter Langley obtained for him, chronicling the story of their lives. Here are two men who have been through it all. Older brother Langley was returned back from the Great War as damaged goods only to learn that their parents had died during his abscence and his younger brother has taken up with a thieving maid. As the world ended for them, their lives continued on as relics from the past.
Sorry E.L. I expected more from a seasoned writer. Frankly, this book seemed like a lazy exercise. Take a fascinating subject and not do much with it. Great descriptions if you were writing a lengthy description for a writing class, not for this caliber of writing.
funny
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I very much liked the first person narrative book. Other than YA or younger, you don't often find an engaging first person narrator in literacy fiction. However, I wasn't as moved as I expected to be. I didn't really feel for either brother. Also, I didn't really buy all of the incidents of the book - the hippies coming to squat with them or the gangster recovering on their kitchen table. I should have been moved, even perhaps horrified, by two brothers living in a cave of trash and shutting out the world and yet I wasn't.
I loved this moving and haunting and melancholy portrait of the Collyer brothers. I simply couldn't pull my attention away from their journey.
I can't quite believe this is my first Doctorow novel, but there it is. I enjoyed this quick read that fictionalizes the story of New York's most famous hoarders, the Collyer Brothers. There's a mild Forrest Gump-like narrative arc that shows the brothers responding to different monumental events of the twentieth century. I questioned whether the idiosyncratic recluses would have never had a fight (really?), but the men and their increasingly cluttered home were effectively evoked.
I enjoyed the way this was told from the perspective of the blind brother, but I actually found it to be less fanciful than I had hoped for.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
An imaginative look into how the Collyer brothers may have lived out their lives. The story is told from the viewpoint of the blind brother, Homer.