Homer & Langley (2009) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Homer Collyer: Blind, younger brother
• Langley Collyer: Older brother injured in WWI
• Mary Elizabeth Riordan: Student
• Jacqueline Roux: Homer's "muse"
• Vincent: A prohibition era gangster who is friendly with Homer and Langley in the twenties...and makes and unexpected return into their lives many years later.
• Siobhan: Add a description of this character.
• Lissy
• Julia
• Harold Robileaux
• Grandmamma Robileaux
• Alan Roses
• Massimo
• Perdita Spence
• Eleanor
• Lila Van Dijk
• Mrs. Hoshiyama

Quotes edit see section history

• “"We had a joke, Langley and I: Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, come the answer, only not yours."”

  Homer

• “The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we've made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce evething that we did on earth, we'll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.”

  Langley

• “"In the old days there was another poet he liked to quote:'I'm me, and what the hell can I do about it!....I, the solemn investigator of useless things."”

  Home quoting Langley

• “"You understand, Mr Homer? hou think a word and you can hear its sound. I am telling you what I know--words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them."”

  Jacqueline

• “I'm Homer, the blind brother. I didn't lose my sight all at once, it was like the movies, a slow fade-out....What I did this particular winter was to stand back from the lake in Central Park where they did all their ice skating and see what I could see and couldn't see as a day-by-day thing. The houses on Central Park West went first, they got darker as if dissolving into the dark sky until I couldn't make them out, and then the trees began to lose their shape, and then finally, this was toward the end of the season, maybe it was late February of that very cold winter, and all I could see were these phantom shapes of the ice skaters floating past me on a field of ice, and then the white ice, that last light, went gray and then altogether black, and then all of sight was gone though I could hear clearly the scoot scut of the blades on the ice, a very satisfying sound, a soft sound though full of intention....”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• We had a joke, Langley and I: Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

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• He wanted to fix American life finally in one edition, what he called Collyer’s eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need.

  Highlighted by 59 Kindle customers

• And so do people pass out of one’s life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

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• And then there was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin—an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.

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• Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.

  Highlighted by 48 Kindle customers

• But isn’t it interesting that someone in the grip of such a monstrous religious fantasy—believing she is doing the Lord’s work—is doing the work that the Lord would be doing if there was a Lord?

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• fatuitous happiness in His presence. Langley was always able to lift my dark moods from me.

  Highlighted by 38 Kindle customers

• There was something about Langley’s worldview, firmly in place at his birth, though perhaps polished to a shine at Columbia College, that would confer godlike immunity to such an ordinary fate as death in a war: it was innocents who died, not those born with the strength of no illusions.

  Highlighted by 32 Kindle customers

• aperçu he was sent out on patrol night after night, crawling over a furrowed blasted plain of mud and barbed wire, pressing himself to the ground when the Very flares lit up the sky.

  Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers

• antiphonically, of his experiences. I would not have asked him about it, I wanted him to be his old self, I recognized that he needed to recover. He had not known till he came back that our parents had succumbed to the flu.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• New York
• Hoshiyamas
• Heaven
• Central Park
• Paris

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. E. L. Doctorow (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 813.54

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction › Historical
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary