FICTION: Homer and LangleyBy EL Doctorow, Little, Brown, 208pp. £11.99
EL DOCTOROW'S Homer and Langleytells such a sweet story, in such clean, poetic prose, that it seems ungrateful to complain about the book's more perfunctory aspects: its superficial treatment of major historical events, its occasional sententiousness, its tendency to narrate rather than to dramatise.
It’s a slight book: the tale of two eccentric New York brothers, Homer and Langley Collyer, whose lives span most of the 20th century. Homer, the narrator, is blind. Langley is damaged, physically and psychologically, in the first World War, and becomes a recluse, beset by crotchets and bizarre obsessions. For its first 50 pages the book feels masterly. But then something starts to go wrong.
By now, of course, Doctorow is the acknowledged master of a certain kind of historical re-creation: no one summons the tart manners and hidden corruption of Manhattan in the Gilded Age better than him, and no one has taken more interesting risks with the form of the historical novel: the fictitious meetings between real personages in Ragtime, for instance, or the gothic machinations of The Waterworks. So perhaps Doctorow can be forgiven for providing, in Homer and Langley, no more than a vague and unengaged tour of the main events, from the first World War to Watergate. But his reluctance to involve his characters too deeply with these events leaves his novel, after its wonderful opening movement, feeling sketchy and somewhat thin.
Things do begin beautifully, however, with the easy, elastic swing of Doctorow’s prose: a rich, pungent, classically American prose, filled with echoes of Walt Whitman and Edith Wharton. Blind Homer listens to some ice skaters in Central Park, and hears “a deeper tone than you’d expect made by the skate blades, perhaps for having sounded the resonant basso of the water under the ice”. In his parents’ cluttered Fifth Avenue mansion he finds a “sense of living with things assertively inanimate”. At first Doctorow seems energised by the difficulties of having a narrator who is blind: his prose achieves a musical sensitivity to the tiny bits of evidence upon which all of us, and not just the blind, build our judgments of the world. Homer hears people smile, reminding us that we, too, can tell if a person is smiling simply from the sound of their voice.
Alas, the prose thins out at around the same time the narrative does, and the freshness and rhythmic perfection of the opening pages are gradually edged aside by clangers such as “the love broke over me like the hot tears of a soul that has found salvation”, and “Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past”. We get rhymes – “malign alignment of spiritual forces” – and cliches – “At this time my brother was also down in the dumps”.
Once Doctorow moves his characters forward in time – leaving behind the horse-and-carriage world of Teddy Roosevelt’s US, the world he knows so well – he seems less comfortable, less at home. Historical cruxes are ticked off, one by one. The Japanese couple who work for the Collyers are interned during the second World War. Homer and Langley watch the moon landings on television. Some hippies move into the Fifth Avenue mansion, smoke pot, have sex and leave again. Each crisis, each departure, is seen off with a reflective paragraph that doesn’t mean much of anything: “And so, what with one thing and another, we threw open the shutters, and, for a while, we would again be windowed on the world.”
It might be hoped that the perspective of a blind recluse – a “principled separatist” – could offer the reader some fresh insights into some or all of these events, but Doctorow never really gives us anything new. Vietnam was a bad war; racial violence was a sad thing; hippies were dropouts who despised the regnant culture. These apercus are the best that Homer – and his creator – can come up with.
Langley, the war-damaged brother, is the real centre of the book. It is therefore a pity that he never entirely becomes more than the sum of his quirks. His quest to condense all of history into a single, never-to-be-outdated newspaper is an amusing conceit but no more than that; it doesn’t tell us anything much about who Langley is. Likewise, the gradual transformation of the Collyers’ house into a museum of 20th-century bric-a-brac never quite coheres into a functioning metaphor for the baggage we amass throughout a life.
If Homer and Langleylived up to the promise of its first 50 pages, it would be a masterpiece. As it stands, it is a lopsided book, forlornly superficial, and not fully achieved. A novelist of Doctorow's gifts can be forgiven the occasional misfire. But one can't help but feel that an opportunity has been lost.
Kevin Power's debut novel, Bad Day in Blackrock, is published by Lilliput. He was the recipient of this year's Rooney Prize for Irish Literature
