Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow
In the Gilded Age, how did one stave off loneliness and emotional despair when they were privileged, intelligent and rich as Roosevelt—but without a good therapist and a prescription for Zoloft?

Well, if you were the infamously fascinating Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, you made some attempts at normalcy: marriage, affairs with sexy Hungarian maids, dance parties replete with hilarious gangsters, cake-loving prostitutes and Japanese-American refugees who’d teach you a thing or two about the preciousness of humanity. But as these people transition in and out of their lives – (some of whom Homer and Langley become heartbreakingly devoted to), we know they are destined for no one but themselves.

Of course this is the ultimate co-dependency tale: the sensitive though pragmatic narrator, Homer, (congenitally blind since adolescence), depends wholly on his older brother’s decision making. And while the loyalty of the unhinged Langley, (a bitter, wounded vet of The Great War), to his impaired younger sibling is profound, it will mean their undoing.

Over time, to compensate for the depth and vastness of their solitary existence, they seek to fill it in with outrageous detritus: numerous pianos, second-hand bikes, hoards of broken toys, cases of World War I gas masks, M-1 rifles – even a Model T in the walnut-paneled dining room—not to mention leaning mega-towers of worm-riddled newspapers; (Langley’s daily effort to chronicle and immortalize the most significant events between the decades of Auschwitz and Woodstock) – and all of it a kind of foreshadowing—growing with the impending and ominous power of a junkyard tsunami.

Reviews of Doctorow’s tenth novel have been furiously mixed: The New York Times expressing doubt that readers would be able to make the leap across the chasm of the Collyer brother’s bewildered souls – that is from packrat mentality to plausible madness.

But consider the insanity of pop culture and the Collyers as foils:

In one sparkling moment Langley’s rightful and explosive summation of Americans hooked on TV is enough to drive anyone over the edge:

“If I watch anymore I might as well take a boat down the Amazon and have my head shrunken by the Jivaro!”

Homer & Langley is a sly and bittersweet magical mystery tour of our times.

Enjoy their excellent adventure!

 Wanting by Richard Flanagan
Cultural transformation in the early part of the Victorian Era is among the themes set forth in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting; an intricate cat’s cradle of plotlines which shift in setting between three dense and impenetrable landscapes; the terrifyingly fecund Tasmania at the dawn of its colonization, the dark and frozen Arctic Circle during the ill-fated Franklin expedition, and the mean, fomenting streets of 1840’s London.

Sir John Franklin comes to Van Diemen’s Land, (Tasmania), with fine bone china, the best cigars and Lady Jane, his barren, neurotic wife, who claims to detest children until she sees the lovely Aboriginal orphan girl, Mathinna – a wild child who will prove willfully elusive to Lady Jane’s attempts not only to civilize her, but teach her the social and Christian implications of base desire or wanting. Years pass and Lady Jane’s experiment with Mathinna is tragically unsuccessful.

But ever emotionally detached, Lady Jane, a true Victorian lady, and her husband, move on when he decides to lead a bumble-brained exploration for a passage to the Northwest Territory via the Arctic Circle.

Arrogantly unprepared, he leads his crew into a frozen abyss. No one survives and years pass. Then a rumor surfaces in The Illustrated London News. Eskimos who happened upon the carcasses of several of the men discovered one of the basest of all desires – hunger—driving the very likes of a man like Sir John to cannibalism. Lady Jane will not stand for it. She turns to Charles Dickens, famed author and playwright to refute the lurid accusation.

Dickens, wonderfully brought to life by Flanagan, is despicably sublime; a misogynist who found Jane Austen overrated and prostitutes a rationalized necessity. But he is also more than capable of fictionalizing, if need be, Sir John Franklin’s honor.

That is until Franklin’s story becomes a metaphor for his own passionless existence.

For literary contortionists everywhere.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
In 1966, 385,000 troops were in Vietnam, the Beatles began contemplating Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and housewives across the U.S. staged a revolt against the high cost of food – while in a family compound on a remote island in the north of Sweden a troublingly pretty teen named Harriet Vanger would go missing without a trace. And the case of her disappearance would close – colder than a fijord in the dead of December.

Still, some forty odd years later her obsessive octogenarian industrialist great-uncle, who has compiled and maintained the detailed and weighty police files and photos of the case will not give up the ghost. Is he a ‘knappskalle’? (That’s Swedish for crackpot)

Or perhaps there is no ghost:

Which might explain that on his birthday each year, herr Vanger receives a lovingly pressed flower from his beloved Harriet.

Or perhaps it is from an enemy.

Enter seriously shamed, (though hunky), forty-two year old financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist who knows lots about enemies – and investigative reporting. For an outrageous sum of money as well as freezing his ears off in Sweden’s relentlessly cold north, he agrees to ‘find out’ what happened to Harriet Vanger.

While at the same time, a cunning computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander tracks Blomkvist.

Savagely sexy, vulnerable and definitely deeply disturbed, Salander, in her tats and leather, fears no man – almost to the point of reckless abandon – or at least Absolut-infused adrenalin. But her hunches are so visceral, readers of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, will be clamoring to follow close behind.

The dark doors that open for her in a land known for its impeccably high standard of living, its empathy toward minorities, (though a rigid vein of Neo-Nazism persists), and its intolerance toward domestic abuse; (an indictable crime in the Swedish Penal Code since 1998), will shock some. Because this is only partly a Gone Baby Gone tale. But I’ll say no more. It wouldn’t be fair to the memory of the late Stieg Larsson whose intricately structured thriller-trilogy will surely suck you in!