The novel “Homer and Langley” is a kind of literary experiment. The heroes of the novel - the brothers Homer and Langley - had real prototypes: the Collier brothers, whose story at one time caused a lot of noise in America. The brothers voluntarily abandoned the benefits of civilization, became voluntary hermits and turned their own house into a dump - collecting garbage became their pathological addiction. It would seem that this is a story for the tabloid media. But Doctorow, who, according to him, was interested in this story when he was a teenager, managed to turn it into a novel about love - the love of two brothers who needed no one but each other, and who were so frightened by the surrounding reality, by all the horrors XX centuries that did not want to live in the “big world”, building their own world where there was no place for strangers.