Scanning the Bookshelf

Among contemporary novelists, E.L. Doctorow has no monopoly on the blending of American history with fiction. But the whittling away of boundaries between them is something he's done with such intelligence and narrative flair, in "Ragtime" (1975), "Billy Bathgate" (1989) and other works, that this territory seems his more than anyone else's.

Doctorow is fascinated with the way actual people become mythic, larger than the basic facts of their lives — the way the novelist turns them into characters in stories that hint at something essential about American society. The major characters in his books are almost never large figures in history, perhaps with the exception of General William Sherman in "The March" (2005). (People with influential roles in American history, like J.P. Morgan and Booker T. Washington, get small roles in "Ragtime.")

In Doctorow's new novel, "Homer and Langley," his 11th, he reimagines the story of two brothers whose reclusive ways and strange deaths made them notorious. Others before Doctorow have made them the stuff of fiction: Marcia Davenport first fictionalized their lives in a 1954 novel, "My Brother's Keeper," and since then they have been the model for characters in novels by Stephen King and Kevin Baker and a play by Richard Greenberg, among other works.

Homer and Langley Collyer, born in the 1880s, were the children of affluent parents. They were educated at Columbia and became known for gradually retreating from the world into their Manhattan brownstone. They turned it into an extreme expression of what it means to be packrats, filling every square inch with toys, books, tools, pianos and anything else you can imagine.

"I'm Homer, the blind brother," the book begins. "I didn't lose my sight all at once, it was like the movies, a slow fade-out." And the entire story is told from his point of view — as a tale he feels compelled to write after meeting a French writer and journalist, Jacqueline Roux, on one of his rare expeditions into Central Park.

Doctorow freely alters their lives. The real Homer did go blind, but not until his 50s; Doctorow's Homer loses his sight in his late teens. The real Collyers died in 1947; in the novel, they live on through the 1960s, meeting "flower children" and commenting on events like the moon landing.

(The hippies who crash at the Collyers' Fifth Avenue mansion see them as kindred spirits.) Doctorow also moves the Collyers' home some 30 blocks south, so it's directly across from Central Park.

The brothers form a society of two, even as Homer yearns for the sort of close relationship with a woman he never can achieve. The contact with Roux, as fleeting as is, moves him to call her his muse. And for much of his life, Homer also pines for Mary Riordan, who was his piano student for a time in his youth.

In life, Langley was the pianist, but Doctorow redesigns their lives to make Homer the musician. He takes Franz Liszt as his model, sporting a long mane of hair. Langley is the collector and inventor of outlandish theories of knowledge and history. He ventures out of the house every day to buy several newspapers and to accumulate a mind-boggling assortment of things. His intent, with the papers, it to create "one day's edition of a newspaper that could be read forevermore as sufficient to any day."

Still, Doctorow doesn't depict the Collyer brothers as freaks. There is an aura of dignity that permeates their routines. Homer, expressing a kind of admiration for his brother, recalls, "His interest never flagged from the first day he went out to buy the morning papers to the end of his life when his newspaper bales and boxes of clippings rose from floor to ceiling in every room of our house."

Homer's perseverance with his late-in-life writing project — he uses a typewriter with braille keys — is poignant and touchingly heroic. Meanwhile, Langley busies himself inventing traps and snares among the enormous piles of stuff as protection against intruders. In life, one of these traps fell on him, crushing him, and Homer, blind and immobile, died of starvation.

The strength of the novel is the relationship between the brothers, as filtered through Homer's affectionate voice. Looking back, he tells the reader, "I remember our house as it was in our childhood: a glorious elegance prevailed, calming and festive at the same time. Life flowed through the rooms unencumbered by fear."

Most of the people who drift into their lives seem more like plot devices than fully realized characters, which is the weakness of the novel. You're also left wondering why Homer stops his story abruptly, though the conclusion dovetails with the facts of their grotesque deaths. Superseding these defects, though, is Homer's appealing tone, shaping a haunting and poignant portrait of brothers who possessed a bond that didn't make room for the rest of the world.

To find out more about Robert Pincus and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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