Books by el doctorow full#
Books by el doctorow free#

The cleverness of Doctorow's tactic is to let his story contract, rather than expand: this is a miniature epic of American derangement, the madness of our materialism, our sentimentality about our nation, our futile resistances and a haunting image of being buried alive under our own detritus.The March, by E.L. The curating is, in effect, what Doctorow is offering: finding meaning amid the mess in the classic artistic impulse to create order from chaos. Homer comes to see their house as the demented museum it is, 'although with our riches as yet uncatalogued, the curating still to come'. Eventually, typing his story is the only medium of communication left to him, 'with only the touch of my brother's hand to know that I am not alone'.Īt the end of his tale, Doctorow less builds to a climax than simply pushes us off a cliff, in final sentences of indelible sadness and fright. Langley's refusal to pay the bills means they have no electricity, water, or heat Homer begins to withdraw into his own consciousness as deafness renders his isolation complete. Doctorow has the hippies leave during the great New York blackout, which happened in 1977 but when the lights go out, they go out for good. Wandering past an anti-Vietnam rally one day, the brothers encounter a group of hippies who crash with them for a while – their last encounter with society. Presidents are assassinated and what Langley calls his 'Theory of Replacements' starts to take hold: each event is singular until it is repeated, as inevitably it will be.

Books by el doctorow free#

They retreat further into their world, boarding up the door and windows, refusing to pay the mortgage or utility bills as Langley tries to fight what he sees as an increasingly totalitarian state: 'We're not free if at someone else's sufferance' is his refrain.

Once these friends leave, the brothers become increasingly isolated and Langley grows paranoid.

In the 1920s, they drink in speakeasies and mingle with gangsters during the Depression, they throw 'tea dances' during the Second World War, their servants, Japanese Americans, are sent to an internment camp. The brothers are not always so reclusive. A satire on the hoarding impulse, this is also an image of history itself, a labyrinth of detritus and information, all waiting to be found meaningful.

Books by el doctorow full#

By the end of their lives, the house is a 'labyrinth of hazardous pathways, full of obstructions and many dead ends'. Before long, he has rebuilt a Model T Ford in the dining room. He intends to collate all newspapers in order 'to fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer's eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need'.īut this is just the beginning of Langley's pathological hoarding. Langley begins by collecting newspapers, driven by a manic need to catalogue the news. Their parents succumb to the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 and soon Langley's uncontrolled stockpiling begins. One epochal event rapidly succeeds another, as Homer sits quietly at home, musing and playing the piano: Langley is shipped off to the First World War and returns mustard-gassed and embittered, if not neurasthenic, the condition that the philosopher William James referred to as 'Americanitis'. Homer, the blind brother, is also the blind bard, the musician-artist who'll chronicle the brothers' strange, sad lives.

There, they collect crates of relics the deranged acquisitiveness to come is not without its familial origins. The story begins during the Gilded Age, as Homer recalls waving goodbye to his wealthy parents as they embark for annual trips to Europe.