Homer & Langley // Adams in V.?

[alice wellintown]

A fine read. But there is something about the newsreel/real that irks
me, something about the Jewish Bronx born author's voice that jerks me
away from Homer and into Doctorow's historisizing.

BTW, I wouild not call P an historical novelist; he writes, when he
writes not for money or from a political soap box, american romance &
satire.

NY Times; a review by schillinger of Homer & Langley by e.l. doctorow.

When Homer hears of a newspaper photo­graph of Langley “shuffling down
Fifth Avenue in a porkpie hat, a ragged coat down to his ankles, a
shawl he’d made from a burlap sack, and house slippers,” he knows his
brother’s sanity has taken a nose dive but blames it on civic outrage.
“I will say in my brother’s defense that he had a lot on his mind. It
was a period of appalling human behavior.”

Of course, if disturbing headlines were enough to justify such a
reaction, there would be what the police call a “Collyer situation” on
every city block. When Homer, in a bid for empathy, asks, “What could
be more terrible than being turned into a mythic joke?” readers caught
up in Doctorow’s tender, lushly drawn narrative may feel a pang,
remembering Langley’s Theory of Replacements and wondering what slot
history has in store for them. Yet after the novel’s spell ebbs, they
will probably, guiltily, revert to the more instinctive response to
Homer’s plea. What’s worse than being turned into a joke? Dying in
your house buried under 100 tons of trash. The achievement of
Doctorow’s masterly, compassionate double portrait is that it succeeds
for 200 pages in suspending the snigger, elevating the Collyers beyond
caricature and turning them into creatures of their times instead of
figures of fun.h



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/books/review/Schillinger-t.html