Homer and Langley

2.5 stars? Maybe 3? I don't know, don't ask me.

How meta is this: a montage of the 20th century, told from the perspective of Homer Collyer, one of two reclusive, eccentric brothers who withdrew into their crumbling, trash(=another man's treasure)-filled home where they could watch time and cultural change flow by with minimal participation; but who, because of their reclusion and their filthy house, themselves became a great cultural phenomenon of the 20th century, and a pathetic representation of humanity's decline; except that, filtered through the windows of their timeless brownstone(=the glory and limitations of their own minds), we are made to understand that none of the cultural change is actually significant or meaningful, time flows on and everything old is new again, essentially justifying Langley Collyer's nihilistic Theory of Replacements, so that a montage is really the most perfect representation of the passage of time. All of which is contained in the metaphor of Langley's single-edition ur-newspaper containing the templates of all news that has ever happened before, and will ever happen in the future.

Then again... Langley cannot actually write his newspaper because in order to contain world events in a filing system, he must continually expand the filing system into so many categories as to be essentially useless. So maybe time and cultural change are significant and meaningful after all, and we are supposed to pity the Collyers even as they insist on maintaining fierce and total independence.

And then they die, and anyone who knows anything about 20th century hoarders/recluses knows that their tons of accumulated trash were pulled out of the house and the decrepit house was demolished, to be replaced with a small park. And the whole thing is just a cultural oddity, one tiny blip in the riotous miasma of the 20th century.

For imaginative delving into the psyche of an eccentric recluse, I prefer The Underground Man, by Mick Jackson.

For a discourse on the passage of time and what it means to find and occupy one's place in the world, I much prefer Orlando, by Virginia Woolf.

But I did enjoy this, more or less, I guess.

Doctorow's take on the story of Homer and Langley Collyer was an entertaining and quick read. Presented as Homer's memior, we see through his blind eyes how he and his disabled veteran brother increasingly withdraw from a world that decreasingly makes sense - or perhaps never made sense and keeps repeating itself.

I enjoyed how Homer attempts to rationalize both his brother's increasingly strange behavior and his own self-imposed isolation. Having history weave its way into their house is a unique way to review the 20th century. It seemed to show what an exercise in futility most major events were and how little progress was made in that course of time.

What I also appreciated was the brothers' shunning of their wealth, their goal of self-sufficiency, and their increasingly individualist and libertarian leanings. There are many good lines about cops, wars, the state and capitalism in there. And I loved the excellent and depressing ending.