Book Review by The New York Times - How Did They End Up That Way?

Having seen this kind of thing for myself first hand, I later came to understand the compulsive "collecting" of trash as "Collyer Syndrome." This book fictionalizes the lives of Homer and Langley Collyer, two men who lived in a mansion in Harlem that were found dead in their own trash in 1947. Interesting!

Dave

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Books of The Times
How Did They End Up That Way?

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By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: August 31, 2009

The last name of the title characters of E. L. Doctorow’s new novel, “Homer & Langley,” is Collyer, and the book’s brothers do, in fact, turn out to be versions of those infamous New York pack rats, whose overstuffed Harlem brownstone — crammed floor to ceiling with towering piles of newspapers, suitcases and boxes, as well as 14 pianos, half a dozen toy train sets, chandeliers, a car chassis and more than 100 tons of garbage — made their name synonymous with obsessive-compulsive collecting.
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The New York Times

In 1947 a police inspector looked at the clutter-filled brownstone where the brothers Homer and Langley Collyer were found dead amid their possessions.

HOMER & LANGLEY

By E. L. Doctorow

208 pages. Random House. $26.
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An Excerpt From "Homer & Langley"
Marion Ettlinger

E. L. Doctorow
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The New York Times

The day in March 1947 when the Collyers’ brownstone at Fifth Avenue and 128th Street was raided by the police.

The corpses of the two men would be found in their Fifth Avenue home by police in 1947: one buried under an avalanche of rat-infested trash; the other, dead of starvation and assorted ailments.

How did the well-to-do scions of one of New York’s oldest families come to such a sad and ludicrous end? The story is a kind of male, New York City version of “Grey Gardens,” and it has fascinated writers for years. It reportedly inspired Marcia Davenport’s 1954 novel, “My Brother’s Keeper,” and Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, “The Dazzle,” and now Mr. Doctorow, using his patented blend of fact and fiction, has tackled it here, producing a slight, unsatisfying, Poe-like story that turns out to be a study in morbid psychology.

Mr. Doctorow (the E. stands for Edgar) has said he was named for Poe, and he’s ventured into his namesake’s Gothic territory before with his 1994 novel “The Waterworks,” a story about science and detection and families. That novel, like the author’s best-known works, “Ragtime,” “World’s Fair” and “Billy Bathgate,” showcased the author’s magical ability to conjure a vanished New York from the dust and smoke of history.

Clearly Mr. Doctorow wants to do something similar here, going so far as to extend his heroes’ lives through the Watergate era, but the reader unfortunately gets little visceral sense of the city or the country in these pages. After all, Homer and Langley spent much of their lives as recluses and came to inhabit a suffocating realm bounded by the walls of their town house. As a result, there are few excursions into the New York City Mr. Doctorow knows so well, and lots of time — far more than the reader might wish — spent inside the Collyer brothers’ musty, dusty, junk-filled home.

In Mr. Doctorow’s fictionalized telling of the Collyers’ story, Langley suffered from a mustard gas attack during World War I and returned home, damaged and possibly mad. His brother, Homer, who narrates the story, went blind as a teenager but became a skilled pianist and enjoyed the attention of lots of women, who apparently found his helplessness alluring.

As recounted in these pages, the Collyers’ parents died during the great flu epidemic of 1918, and after Langley’s return from the war, the brothers set up housekeeping together. For a while the pair maintained an engagement with the world. Homer has an affair with a house servant; Langley has a short-lived marriage to a tempestuous woman. Both of them develop unconsummated crushes on the beautiful and virginal Mary Elizabeth Riordan, who works as Homer’s assistant. There are visits to speakeasies and nightclubs, and encounters with a gangster who may remind readers of Dutch Schultz in “Billy Bathgate.”

Langley becomes increasingly eccentric, however, holding forth tediously on his Theory of Replacements, a cynical hypothesis that holds that “everything in life gets replaced”: that children are replacements of their parents, and that new generations of geniuses, baseball players and kings are replacements of earlier generations of geniuses, baseball players and kings. Langley sets about collecting and saving newspapers so he can create Collyer’s One Edition for All Time, a quixotic, all-purpose newspaper that will sum up all the varieties of human experience in one set of stories.

Speaking directly to us in a slightly wistful voice, Homer is an engaging enough narrator, and his account of his and Langley’s earlier years can be poignant, as he draws portraits of the people who enter and exit their lives like a passing parade: the charming Mary Elizabeth, who leaves to attend a Roman Catholic junior college; Harold Robileaux, their cook’s grandson and a talented cornet player, who goes off to war and never returns; and Mr. and Mrs. Hoshiyama, a quiet, industrious Japanese couple who take care of the Collyer house until they are arrested by the F.B.I. and sent off to an internment camp in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

But as the Collyers isolate themselves from the world and retreat to their monstrously overcluttered house, the narrative stutters and stalls. Mr. Doctorow never succeeds in making the brothers’ transition from mild eccentricity to out-and-out madness understandable to the reader.

And even though the two men come to constitute each other’s entire world, their relationship, too, remains oddly opaque: because Homer’s blindness never hobbled his life as a young man, his growing dependence on Langley feels hokey and contrived, as does his deference to Langley’s more and more antisocial behavior.

Langley stops paying bills and is soon at war with the city and Con Ed; the electricity and water are turned off; and neighborhood children take to pelting the dilapidated house with rocks. Newspapers start doing articles about the brothers, writing of “the decline of a House, the Fall of a reputable family.”

Meanwhile, the stuff in their house seems to multiply. There are “corridors of newspaper bales,” and piles of equipment, collectibles and junk: “the guts of pianos, motors wrapped in their power cords, boxes of tools, paintings, car body parts, tires, stacked chairs, tables on tables, headboards, barrels, collapsed stacks of books, antique lamps,” piles of clothing and rolled-up carpets.

Like characters in a Poe story, Homer and Langley have entombed themselves within their once-elegant mansion — and become the center of “a circle of animosity rippling outward from our neighbors to creditors, to the press, to the municipality, and, finally to the future.”

As reimagined by Mr. Doctorow, however, their story has no Poe-like moral resonance. It’s simply a depressing tale of two shut-ins who withdrew from life to preside over their own “kingdom of rubble.”

Creative Writing Poll - The New Yorker

As I read the following article in the New Yorker I was struck by how the author missed the point of creative writing programs in general. The purpose of these underrated and undervalued modes of learning is not to teach writers HOW to write, but to help develop their voice, purpose and better understand the necessity of honing their skills toward their selected readership. It also enables us to focus, learn from contemporary and classic authors and form a bond where we can associate with those in search of the same depth and sense of challenge and clarity that all writers strive for. These are not MBA producing factories (sorry, not to offend). Instead these are programs designed to report the human condition through the eyes of people who live everyday lives.

Read the article, take a look at the poll and see if you agree or disagree. I welcome all comments.

Dave

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In the latest issue of the magazine, Louis Menand tackles a fiercely debated question: Can writing be taught? Menand comes to his own conclusions, which, you know, are worth the read, but we here at the Book Bench decided it was time for something more direct—we wanted to hit the cyber-pavement and talk to the people. Yes, that means you, dear reader with an M.F.A.! How useful was that creative-writing program? Take our anonymous and highly un-scientific poll. Results are calibrated in real time, but check in with us at the end of the week to see how things settle.

What do you think of your M.F.A. in creative writing? (Poll Closed)
I enjoyed it. 65%
I didn't. 14%
It was fine. 20%

Was it worth it? (Poll Closed)
Yes. 58%
No. 18%
Is anything worth it? 24%

Have you pursued a career in writing (freelance counts)? (Poll Closed)
Yes! I make my living as a writer. I love myself. 32%
No. What I do for a living is not related to creative writing. It's not creative period. 13%

If so, is it the same genre of writing you got your degree in? (Poll Closed)
Yes. (Fiction.) 38%
Yes. (Non-fiction.) 21%
No. Now I write non-fiction, my degree was in fiction. 36%
No. Now I write fiction, my degree was in non-fiction. 5%

The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly - Mystery Reader.com

Great review on this book! A must for the mystery enthusiast.

Dave

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The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly

(Little, Brown, $27.99, V) ISBN 978-0-316-16630-0

When veteran "cop shop" reporter Jack McEvoy receives his RIF (Reduction in Force) notice from the Los Angeles Times, he is given the rather humiliating option of staying on for two weeks to train his young replacement Angela Cook. During that time, Jack receives a call from a woman who states her son is not guilty of the murder charge to which he allegedly confessed and which was reported by Jack. Curious, Jack goes to her home in South LA to discuss the case and later meets with the court appointed public defender who provides Jack with a flash drive which reveals that while Alonzo confesses to have stolen the car, he did not admit to the murder of the woman found in the trunk. Angela upstages Jack and writes the story first. As part of her research, she surfs the internet for similar cases and discovers a husband convicted of murdering his wife and placing her in the trunk of his car in exactly the same fashion. Could this be a serial killer? Jack travels to Las Vegas to meet with this man's attorney only to discover that his credit cards are cancelled, his bank account is empty and his cell phone is disconnected. Jack drives to the middle of nowhere Nevada to meet with the prisoner but is advised that he will need to wait till the following day. Jack had called Special Agent Rachel Walling for help but after refusing him initially, she appears in his hotel room in Nevada to advise that someone is tracking Jack on the Internet. Indeed, Wesley Carver, aka "The Scarecrow" who is the chief technology officer at The Farm which is a large data storage service, is the brilliant but deranged mastermind behind these bizarre cases and although the serial killer is revealed early on, this does not lessen the reader's interest. The Scarecrow could be called the sequel to The Poet which brings back Jack and Rachel some thirteen years later. Now the newspaper business is struggling and in fact the Rocky Mountain News where Jack previously worked has closed down in real life. Reality suggests that people now turn to the internet more and more for news and The Scarecrow shows us the dark side of technology with cyber villain Wesley Carver. Well-written, current and a fitting homage to the newspaper business, The Scarecrow is a must read not only for Connelly fans, but for any fan of crime fiction.