Homer & Langley : a Novel
The Washington Post – Michael Dirda
?as with his much admired novels The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and The March, Doctorow again creatively reconfigures and amplifies the historical record?There's a briskness to Homer & Langley that never flags, and its solitary protagonists?two lost souls?possess a half-comical, half-nightmarish fascination. They seem, at once, symbols of both American materialism and of American loneliness. Think of Melville's "isolatoes," or of all those forlorn men in shirt sleeves and the dispirited women of Edward Hopper's paintings, or of Hank Williams singing "I'm so lonesome I could cry."