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Literary License will be back next week with more book reviews.

A Review of Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow

Homer & Langley: A Novel
4 out of 5: E.L. Doctorow’s most recent novel, Homer & Langley, is an epic history of twentieth century America as it was experienced by two brothers living in a Fifth Avenue brownstone in New York City. Homer, the blind brother, narrates the story and describes how the brothers become ever more eccentric and reclusive over the decades. Their home becomes a repository for everything the brothers pick up on their wanderings through the city—including gangsters, hippies, and even a jazz trumpeter from New Orleans—and eventually becomes a destination for curiosity seekers and reporters.

Doctorow is a master at capturing the zeitgeist of a particular period in just a few sentences, like this view of the Prohibition era: “Some of the clubs were rather elegant, with a pretty good kitchen and a dance floor, others were basement dives where the music came from a radio on a wall shelf broadcasting some swing orchestra from Pittsburgh. But where you went didn't matter, you could die of the gin in any of these joints, and the mood was the same everywhere, people laughing at what wasn't funny.”

Such conciseness is necessary since, in just over 200 pages, Homer & Langley takes us through the twentieth century’s most transformative moments in America, including the transition of silent films to talkies to television, the development of jazz, the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War and its opposition, and the Civil Rights Movement. Homer explains: “It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind, and these were the things deposited here by the winds of war.”

At times, Homer & Langley feels too much like a contrived stage for the organized parade of history (compare Forest Gump). Mostly, however, the compassion and sensitivity with which Doctorow presents the brothers, along with Homer’s unique voice, make this novel a joy to read.

Review of The Vampire of Ropraz by Jacques Chessex (translated by W. Donald Wilson)

The Vampire of Ropraz

3.5 out of 5: It’s 1903, and a suspected vampire is on the loose in Ropraz, a small, forested town in Switzerland, described as a "land of wolves and neglect," oppressed by "four centuries of imposed ‘Calvinism.’” Even without vampires, Ropraz is a town steeped in suspicion and superstition:

Endlessly construing the threat from deep within and from without, from the forest, from the cracking of the roof, from the wailing of the wind, from the beyond, from above, from beneath, from below: the threat from elsewhere. You bar yourself inside you skull, your sleep, your heart, your senses; you bolt yourself inside your farmhouse, gun at the ready, with a haunted, hungry soul.

The terror begins in Jacques Chessex’s atmospheric novella when the recently buried corpse of 20-year-old Rosa Gilliéron, daughter of the town’s Justice of the Peace, is found unearthed and violently desecrated. The local paper quickly labels the perpetrator the “Vampire of Ropraz,” and the finger-pointing starts. Loaded with sexual tension and provincial overreaction, The Vampire of Ropraz is a dark portrait of a remote place trapped in its own suspicions and tortured by its oppressive religious beliefs: "There is, above all, welling up from generations of tortured brooding, the assurance of punishment from on high suspended over our lives."

Nine-tenths of The Vampire of Ropraz is a concise and masterful rendering of a dark place victimized by an even darker act. A bizarre, ironic twist at the very end of the story, however, throws a farcical light over the book, serving to undo much of the powerful effect achieved earlier. It's an unfortunate ending to a grimly entertaining tale.

Review of The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger
4.5 out of 5: The Little Stranger, a new novel by well-known British author Sarah Waters, examines the great social upheaval in England during the years immediately following World War II through the perspective of a once-grand family as that perspective is narrated by the family’s local doctor, Dr. Faraday. Mrs. Ayers and her two adult, unmarried children, Caroline and Roderick, are the last remnants of the Ayres family living in crumbling Hundreds Hall on an unkempt estate in rural England. Dr. Faraday, who comes from humble origins, befriends the family after a house call to treat an ailing servant. It’s a friendship that never would have formed in the pre-war era of strict social hierarchies, and Dr. Faraday takes great pride in his association with the high-class Ayers.

Beginning with an inexplicable dog attack, a number of strange occurrences in the Hall suggest a supernatural presence. Though the occurrences become ever more violent, it remains unclear whether the ghostly presence is real or merely a figment of the family’s over-stressed imagination. Things become increasingly desperate, and the Ayers family, one by one, succumbs to the force—whether supernatural, socioeconomic, or imagined—that seems determined to break them. Through it all, Dr. Faraday is the steady voice of rationality, at first a welcome respite but becoming more and more ominous over time.

The gradual mental and financial collapse of the Ayers family parallels the disintegration of the British class system, and this interplay results in a rich story with many layers of meaning. The supernatural elements avoid cliché by their ambiguity. Is Dr. Faraday correct that there’s a rational explanation for everything? Or is Roderick right that an unseen malevolent force is threatening the family? Waters masterfully maintains this delicate ambiguity to the chilling and dramatic end. The Little Stranger is a quick-paced psychological thriller nested within an insightful social commentary. The combination is thrilling and intelligent.