David Lurie
05-20-2011, 11:58 AM
Everybody who knows one thing or two about American folklore knows Homer and Langley, the Collyer brothers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyer_brothers), but this novel is not a fictionalized account of their lives, Doctorow assumes their characters have some kind of mythical value and so he has decided to tell his own telling of this myth. Doctorow has operated many changes to the actual lives of the Collyer brothers, the main one is expanding their life span until the late seventies - approximately I'd say, since the absence of dates leaves to the reader to locate the events outside the Collyer's lives to a specific year.
"I'm Homer, the blind brother..." the first line of the novel reveals - unwillingly? - that we are going to face a highly symbolic novel, there is not much plot here, it's the Collyer's struggle against an increasingly oppressing American society mingled with two world wars, Italian gangsters, the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbour, Vietnam, the hippies and the Watergate. The Collyer brothers in the way Doctorow sees them represent the loss of meaning of the individual in 20th century America, 20th century followers of Thoreau in a way.
The real flaw of the book is not the absence of plot, but the overtly cerebral - our narrator is blind at the beginning of the book and will be deaf too at the end of it - structure of the novel and its heavy symbolism would have benefited from a different kind of prose - of a poetic kind à la Cormac McCarthy. This is an ambitious novel - just like one of his characters wants to write the definitive newspaper, Doctorow wants to write the definitive critique of 20th century America in 200 pages - but IMHO Doctorow has failed to deliver the epic and mythical tale he wanted to tell.
"I'm Homer, the blind brother..." the first line of the novel reveals - unwillingly? - that we are going to face a highly symbolic novel, there is not much plot here, it's the Collyer's struggle against an increasingly oppressing American society mingled with two world wars, Italian gangsters, the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbour, Vietnam, the hippies and the Watergate. The Collyer brothers in the way Doctorow sees them represent the loss of meaning of the individual in 20th century America, 20th century followers of Thoreau in a way.
The real flaw of the book is not the absence of plot, but the overtly cerebral - our narrator is blind at the beginning of the book and will be deaf too at the end of it - structure of the novel and its heavy symbolism would have benefited from a different kind of prose - of a poetic kind à la Cormac McCarthy. This is an ambitious novel - just like one of his characters wants to write the definitive newspaper, Doctorow wants to write the definitive critique of 20th century America in 200 pages - but IMHO Doctorow has failed to deliver the epic and mythical tale he wanted to tell.