ruthiella 's review for:

Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow

2.0

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I so loved Ragtime by Doctorow but none of the subsequent books by him have had that same magic. I found much of Homer and Langley dull really. The Wiki page about the real life Collyer brothers was more interesting to me, frankly. Doctorow moves the story up a couple of decades too from the historical account for some reason. In novel, Homer, who went blind in his teens, is a musician and his older brother Langley allegedly cares for him, though Langley is not the same man since he returned from WWI with lungs scarred from having been gassed. Slowly the brothers become more and more estranged from the outside world, rarely leaving their brownstone mansion on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Langley has many crack pot ideas, most of which cause him to bring more and more things into the house and the found objects soon fill every crevice of the once grand mansion. The book seems to want to give some sort of panoramic sweep of U.S. history from the first half of the 20th century, but it didn’t quite manage that for me personally.