Imagine you were born well-placed and wealthy, with servants and doting (if absent) parents. Imagine yourselves clever, highly educated and properly groomed to take your places as the sons and heirs of a prominent New York family.
Imagine then a twist of fate -- several, in fact. You lose your eyesight; your brother grows more eccentric; your parents die. Ah, but the house. You still have that Manhattan mansion at 2078 Fifth Ave. (the corner of 128th St.).
Those were the Collyer Brothers. Homer and Langley Collyer: 70 years ago they were the staple of tabloid newspapers. They'd gone crazy, you see. They lived alone, their rodent-infested mansion was filled with 40 years' worth of newspapers and broken machinery; they refused to pay their bills so they had no water, electricity or heat; they roamed the City at night scrounging food; they set dozens of elaborate booby traps to protect themselves from the thieves they were convinced were trying to break into their house; and in the end, when the police finally crawled inside because of the smell of a dead body, they found Langley dead from one of his own booby traps, Homer dead of starvation. The Collyer Brothers: famous freaks from another era.
E. L. Doctorow was a teenager when the Collyer Brothers' deaths made the New York papers. Now he has retold the tale as "Homer & Langley," a short, evocative, strangely compelling novel. In Doctorow's imagining, the brothers live longer -- long enough, in fact, to watch half of the 20th century drift loopily past their window, as though squinting at history through the narrow crack of a blind.
It is the narrow, pinched perspective of two men whose ingenuity was too great a match for their sanity. And yet, by burrowing past the Collyers' locked doors and booby traps, E. L. Doctorow manages to unlock our own sympathies.
Homer is the narrator: lucid, placid, slyly humorous and ever ready to accept the life that landed upon him. "They were not entirely thoughtless parents," says Homer of his childhood, "for there were always presents for Langley and me, things to really excite a boy, like an antique toy train that was too delicate to play with, or a gold-plaited hairbrush."
As Homer's eyesight fades, Doctorow reproduces his day-to-day life through the sounds and smells of New York:
"{I} gauged the progress of our times by the changing sounds and smells of the streets. In the past the carriages and equipages hissed or squeaked or groaned, the drays rattled, the beer wagons pulled by teams passed thunderously ... Then the combustive put-out of the motorcars was added to the mix and gradually the air lost its organic smell of hide and leather, the odor of horse manure on hot days did not hang like a miasma over the street nor did one now often hear that wide-pan shovel of the street cleaners shlushing it up ..."
Doctorow uses no chapter breaks, just periodic separations to simulate the episodic passage of time in the company of this pair of extraordinarily strange people. As the decades unfold, the Collyer Brothers' circumstances devolve, but slowly enough so that we can see it happen and practically understand it.
One of the best sequences arrives when the aging Homer and Langley host a colony of hippies:
"They were itinerants who had chosen poverty and were too young and heedless to think what the society would eventually do to them by way of vengeance. Langley and I could have told them. They had seen our house as a Temple of Dissidence, and made it their own, so even if we had said, Look at us, look at what you might become, it wouldn't have meant anything."
(These scenes are pure invention -- in real life the Collyers died in the 1940s.)
In Doctorow's telling, the Collyers' last act begins when the City of New York shuts off first their electricity and then the water, and the brothers' quaint eccentricities become a base struggle to survive.
"They had opted out--that was the primary fact," Doctorow says of the Collyers' hermit-hoarding in an interview posted on Amazon.com. "Coming from a well-to-do family, with every advantage, they had locked the door and closed the shutters and absented themselves from the life around them. A major move, as life transforming as emigration. In fact it was a form of emigration, of leave-taking. But where to? What country was within that house?"
In the end, the brothers' house became not another country but an aged, dying organism, moving ever more slowly, weighted down with the detritus of a lifetime. Doctorow's achievement, simply, is in making us wonder and care about the Collyers. And in our own city filled with street wanderers, where shopping carts sub for New York brownstones, that is no small thing.