When Novels are Based on Life....Kind Of

A few weeks ago I raced through Homer and Langley, the latest novel penned by E.L. Doctorow (famous for classics like City of God and Ragtime).

While sweeping and compelling and utterly fantastical, the story also happens to be based on two real-life brothers who spent their lives as hermits in a Harlem brownstone, eventually dying amidst their own squalor. It wasn't until I was more than two-thirds through it that I found out that the story had its roots in reality (oops!), which added a whole new layer of enjoyment and wonder to the rest of my reading experience. I mean turn-of-the-century hoarders? One brother prescribing a diet of one hundred oranges a day to the other when his eyesight failed? Using a Model T engine to generate electricity and installing the whole contraption--car and all--into the parlor? For real??? According to a little web research, yep, it's all for real.

Now, some of you might already know of my general disinterest in nonfiction, or could perhaps conclude it based on the name of my blog and the books I tend to read and review. This is certainly my own shortcoming, but for some reason I just never feel as fully immersed in biographies or historical writing; it is as if the author, accepting that she can never really and completely know the person or event being discussed, keeps those people and events at an arm's length. While I appreciate the lack of presumption, I infinitely prefer fiction, in which the authors can and should know the whole story, since they are creating those people, those events, those worlds in which we, as readers, are invited to inhabit utterly, if only for a little while.

But luckily, we readers are rarely forced to choose between complete fiction and pure nonfiction; in fact, I'm sure there are very few authors of fiction who would say that their works, no matter how fantastical, don't include several grains of real experience, nor would biographers or historical writers deny a certain level of artistic license being involved when threading together assorted facts and figures to create a cohesive narrative. This is why I really and truly love those works that happily exist in the liminal space between the two ends of the spectrum, works that shamelessly borrow from reality while adding in healthy doses of imagination. It is exactly in this gray area that Homer and Langley exists, blurring together the historical and the mythical to create something like written technicolor.