HOMER & LANGLEY, by E.L. Doctorow. Random House; 208 pages; $26.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Homer Collyer goes blind as a teenager via a congenital condition, but for his brother, Langley, events are even more traumatic. He comes home from World War I a changed man, with his body covered with scars from the mustard gas that robbed him of his beautiful tenor voice, leaving him with a gargly rasp.
And then their father, a wealthy doctor, dies of the flu, as does their mother, and the brothers are isolated in their luxurious Fifth Avenue mansion.
E.L. Doctorow's "Homer & Langley" is a fantasia about the legendary Collyer brothers of New York, who both died in 1947 and whose decrepit mansion held more than 100 tons of garbage, not including their dead bodies. I say fantasia because Doctorow isn't bound by the historical reality of the Collyers; for one thing, he takes their story into the 1970s.
As the decades drift by, the brothers live in smaller and smaller parts of the mansion because Langley fills up most of the available open areas with his obsessions. Newspapers, of course, bales and bales of newspapers to document his vast, impossible life's work: an eternally dateless current newspaper, an ultimate compilation assembled from hundreds of thousands of newspapers Langley buys six and eight at a time every day of his life.
Each category of story — military invasions, mass murders, political malfeasance, investment scams, trials — is to be winnowed down to an essential, timeless condensation that would encompass cyclical human misbehavior.
The newspapers grow to immense piles all through the house, but there are also broken toys, model airplanes, mattresses, lead soldiers, game boards, anything Langley can find and lug home. In one spectacular example of psychosis run amok, Langley brings a disassembled Model T into the house, puts it together, and leaves it in the dining room. Soon, the entire house smells of leaking oil.
Between the hoarder brother and the helpless blind brother, life in the haunted mansion plays out in a strange, muffled fashion; the brothers' decorous upbringing forbids temperamental explosions, so they quietly plod on, boats against the current, frozen in time.
Langley, of course, is certifiably insane. Homer senses it but seems disinclined to do anything about it. Langley refuses to pay the mortgage, refuses to pay the electric bills. He also refuses Homer's suggestion to pay off the mortgage, because if he did that he'd lose the interest deduction.
"But we're not getting the deduction if we're not meeting the payments," Homer says, not unreasonably. "All we're getting is penalties that offset the deduction. And why are we talking about taxes since we don't pay them?"
They are brothers, this is their family house, and here they will stay, at least until life, in the form of the outside world, intrudes. The buildings decay, squatters move in, and the Collyer brothers decay physically as well as psychologically.
Doctorow's book plays to his great gift for time and its passage, and the way that time drags people into new, uncomfortable circumstances, but the story of the Collyers is inherently surreal, and the fact that his narrator is blind makes things even vaguer. In some respects, the novel feels more like a Paul Auster book than a Doctorow book, because the situations are so muffled by Homer's blindness, which renders the true dimensions of Langley's madness needlessly remote.
Would it be impertinent to say that Doctorow chose the wrong narrator? Being inside Langley's mind would put us at the mouth of the madness, and make Homer's helplessness more awful.
"Homer & Langley" is artfully done — everything Doctorow does is artfully done, and he's incapable of a clumsy sentence — but the novel doesn't work the way Doctorow must have intended. It's a distanced novel; you read it, but you never come close to feeling it.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.