Homer and Langley, by E. L. Doctorow

Characters:

Homer Collyer

Langley Collyer

• Lila van Dijk – wife, kicked out after one year

Siobhan – maid

Julia – maid

Wolf – butler, chauffeur

Mrs. Robileaux – cook

• Harold – musician, grandson, killed in WW II
• Ella – Harold’s wife

Mary Elizabeth Riordan – piano student, became Sr. M. E. Riordan, killed in jungle

Vincent – gangster

• Massimo - son

Mr. and Mrs. Hoshiyama - hired to clean, sent to detention camp during WW II

Hippies – during Vietnam War

• Lissy
• JoJo
• Connor
• Dawn
• Sundown

Jacqueline Roux– muse, met in park at end of book

Historical events throughout novel:

• WW I
• Great Depression
• WW II
• Korean War
• Vietnam War
• Jim Jones
• Four young girls murdered in Sunday School in Birmingham, AL

For discussion:

1.       Discuss Langley’s Theory of Replacements – “Everything in life gets replaced.”  Do you agree?  Can everything be replaced?  Even people? 

a.       Eventually this theory developed into the idea that the same things happened over and over again.   Do you agree with this?

2.       On page 12 Homer writes, “Life was made tolerable by its formalities.”  Do you agree?

3.       What did you think about Homer’s affair with Julia?  Why did she continue with the affair?  Did she steal Homer’s mother’s ring?

4.       Discuss the tea dances.  Why do you think people sat out the livelier numbers and danced to the slow songs?  Homer’s theory was that people had lost their will to fight.  What do you think? (page 64)

5.       Discuss Langley’s impulse buying.  He bought things because of an “unthinking impulse” and felt that he would eventually need the item or understand why he bought it.  Can you relate?

6.       When Vincent and Massimo were hiding in house and did not kill the brothers, Homer wrote that, “At no time did they consider us worth shooting.”  How did that realization make the brothers feel?  How did it make you feel regarding their story?

7.       Discuss the hippies moving in and how there were more people living there than the brothers realized.  How did this happen?

8.       Trace Homer and Langley’s development throughout novel.  At one point Langley studied law through the mail.  Do you think he would have been able to have a successful normal life under different circumstances?  What kind?  What do you think influenced him to follow the path that he did?

a.       Discuss how Homer dealt with his blindness and eventual loss of hearing.

b.      At one point, Homer thought they “…were living original self-directed lives unintimidated by convention – could we not be a supreming of the line, a flowering of the family tree?” (page 177)

9.       Can you understand how Homer and Langley became hoarders?  Do you think anything could have saved them?

10.   Did you like how Homer wrote to Jacqueline throughout the book, but we never meet her until toward the end?

11.   Discuss the end of the book, when both brothers were down to one small space each.  What do you think happened in the end that made the “whole house shake?”

12.   Did you see this book as a narrative about our country’s history as well as about hoarders?  What do you think was Doctorow’s reason for writing the book?

13.   This book was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for fiction.  Do you think it deserved this consideration?