Homer & Langley

Arthur Morey's performance of Doctorow's most recent novel is pallid--an altogether suitable approach for the author's eponymous heroes, a pair of reclusive brothers. More ghosts than human beings, they have retreated into their Upper East Side brownstone, where, for decades, they obsessively hoard all manner of collectibles. The pair were real eccentrics who died in the 1940s, although in Doctorow's fiction he has extended their lives another 30 years so that they'll experience Vietnam and "flower power." But they experience all events only tangentially, from the remove of their withdrawal from life. The perceptions of Homer, the blind brother and teller of this story, seem wistful and unearthly in Morey's narration, but that is most assuredly Doctorow's strange stage direction. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine