New York Adult Entertainment: Beneath piles of stuff, a history cra…
Paranoid, Langley Collyer planted booby traps around their house. It was one of these that trapped him in the end, leaving his dependent, blind brother to die of starvation.
What’s interesting about this story from the annals of American tabloid history — and what it says about our age, mechanization, accumulation and documentation — is for the most part what’s interesting about Doctorow’s novel. Packing the framework of the historical narrative with Homer’s observations and recollections of life, the book becomes a repository of 20th-century events experienced on a personal and idiosyncratic scale.
Immigrants, prostitutes, society women, jazz musicians, gangsters, hippies — all find their way to the Collyers’ door. And throughout, Homer tracks their progress while Langley, a crazy savant of sorts, develops his Theory of Replacement, whereby everything in life gets replaced, one generation by another, one kind of phenomenon by another, forever.