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.”