Usually I feature a non-fiction book on Saturday Review posts, but I thought just in case you’re looking for a good novel to read I’d recommend one of those for a change. It’s Homer & Langley: A Novel, by E. L. Doctorow.
Homer and Langley are brothers. The former goes blind while still young, the latter returns from World War I with physical and perhaps mental effects of being subjected to mustard gas. They live in a gradually decaying old house, becoming more and more reclusive, yet somehow the big events of the 20th century manage to make their mark on them. They’re sad figures but with their own kind of dignity and I think you’ll find theirs a bittersweet tale.
It's based on a true story, as Doctorow mentions in his Amazon essay about this book: "I was a teenager when the Collyer brothers were found dead in their Fifth Avenue brownstone. Instantly, they were folklore...I didn’t know at the time that I would someday write about them, but even then I felt there was some secret to the Collyers--there was something about them still to be discovered under the piles of things in their house--the bales of newspapers and the accumulated detritus of their lives... 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...As myths, the brothers demanded not research but interpretation, and when a few years ago I was finally moved to do this book, I felt as if writing it was an act of breaking and entering just to see what may have been going on in that house, which really meant getting inside two very interesting minds. And with the first sentence, 'I’m Homer, the blind brother,' I was in."
