Homer & Langley: A Novel (Audio)
From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work.Homer and...
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From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work.Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers–the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers–wars, political movements, technological advances–and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through...
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Format: audiobook
ISBN:
9780739334171 (0739334174)
Publish date: September 1st 2009
Publisher: Random House Audio
Edition language: English
Category:
Novels,
Literature,
Book Club,
Adult Fiction,
Historical Fiction,
Literary Fiction,
Adult,
Contemporary,
New York,
Mental Health,
Mental Illness
I am a big fan of roughly half of Doctorow's work. Though this one started with a sense of greatness, ultimately it falls in line with the least favored half of his oeuvre for me. Like several others reviewers, I was disenchanted by Doctorow's blatant changes to the Collyer brothers' story. The trut...
The Collyer brothers were real. Doctorow has brilliantly told a fictionalized account of their lives. Both brothers were disabled. Homer became blind in his teens and Langley was war wounded from exposure to mustard gas in World War I. He was also surely emotionally damaged, perhaps from the war, an...
Doctorow reimagines the lives of two famous New York eccentrics as a way of touring the twentieth century's ups and downs. The Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, inherit their parents' mansion at the far north end of Fifth Avenue, across from the park, just at the end of the (first) World War. At ...
Took forever to finish this because it moves so slowly and gets really tedious, but it's one of those "gotta read it" because of the author kind of books. It's the story of two brothers who live in NYC in a house on upper 5th Ave that deteriorates over the years as they do. One brother is half crazy...
I've read enough memoirs to be able to say that "Homer Collyer", the narrator of this novel, definitely doesn't write like someone who was born in 1881 (when the real Homer Collyer was). To be sure, E. L. Doctorow has distorted the timeline of this story in an unrealistic manner, extending the broth...
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