The brothers grim

In death, the eccentric old brothers achieved a Ripley’s sort of freak-show fame and eventually their own disorder, “Collyers brothers syndrome,’’ or disposophobia, the pack rat’s fear of throwing anything away.

Now our laureate of historical fiction, E.L. Doctorow, has recycled their story as a beautiful and haunting novel, “Homer and Langley.’’ In it, Doctorow sets aside most of the facts and recasts the brothers in an elegant parable of American consumerism - the story of two men buried alive by the 20th century.

Doctorow begins his cloistered epic audaciously, with a blind storyteller named Homer. In just 20 pages, Homer’s parents have died of Spanish flu and his brother, Langley, has gone off to fight World War I, only to come home embittered, his rifle carefully placed on the mantel, a fitting “first piece in the collection of artifacts from our American life.’’

The boys come by their collecting naturally, their parents world travelers who gathered “ancient Islamic tiles or rare books, or a marble water fountain,’’ their doctor father having kept in the house as well “stoppered glass jars of fetuses, brains, gonads and various other organs preserved in formaldehyde.’’

But it is Langley’s growing cynicism, paranoia, and thrift that drives the brothers deeper into compulsive hoarding. He develops a “Theory of Replacements,’’ that each thing, person, and animal has a natural backup waiting in the wings, and later he becomes obsessed with saving, clipping, and filing every newspaper in the world, hoping to create a single master newspaper that will catalogue and possibly predict every event (a nod to Google, one of the book’s many clever contemporary musings). Langley’s obsession is also aimed at trying to take care of his increasingly infirm brother so that, when Homer begins playing piano, more instruments, “a good dozen of them,’’ quickly appear in the house.

It is through the sensitive Homer that we get the story of the brothers’ descent into all this junk, coinciding with their gradual abandonment of the outer world. Doctorow is clear and compassionate in detailing their stunted emotions and phobias, and he creates a surprising kind of suspense as the stuff piles up, and the house begins to close around them into a big, messy tomb.

When they do get visitors, or on the rare occasion when they venture out of the house, the Collyers bump up against the flotsam of history - a soldier going off to World War II, interned Japanese, a charming Billy Bathgate-style gangster.

The real Collyers died horribly in 1947 when Langley, crawling through one of his rat-maze paths through the house, was crushed by a booby trap he’d set to catch burglars. Unable to navigate the piles of trash, Homer starved to death waiting for his brother’s help.

When neighbors complained about the smell, police found the doors and windows blocked and bulging. Eventually, they went in through the roof and hacked through rubbish to find Homer’s body. After two weeks of cleaning out trash, police eventually found Langley’s body just a few feet from where Homer had died.

But a funny thing happens on the way to the brothers’ deaths in “Homer and Langley.’’ That year 1947 approaches . . . and passes quietly, with only Homer’s sly joke: “Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.’’

And so on they go, the Collyers and Doctorow, astride one of literature’s most unlikely picaresques, a road novel in which the rogue heroes can’t seem to leave home. As Homer puts it, their house is “a road on which Langley and I were traveling like pilgrims.’’

If a sightless, lonely old recluse like Homer seems an odd choice to guide us through the paradoxes and perils of modern life - blackouts and hippies, news of suicide cults and murdered Central American nuns - it’s a testament to Doctorow’s skills that the tour never gets old.

As the brothers withdraw from the world, and from real history, the second half of “Homer and Langley’’ could have become overburdened by allegorical ballast. But Doctorow’s writing is so lithe, the book easily sustains all of its thematic musings - about technology and history and consumer culture, even the novelist as kind of housebound Quixote.

No doubt we miss the crisply drawn real world of the first half of the novel - the “pericarped pulp’’ of ripe blackberries, the “combustive put-put’’ of motorcars - but we also realize how the Collyers must have ached for these things too, as their world closes around them, and around us.

As time bleeds on and Langley prepares to defend his treasures with greased washboards and booby-trapped stacks and the belief that “everything alive was at war,’’ Doctorow has achieved a nice piece of transference - the book’s present creeping up on us, our own ratty treasure piled everywhere as we retreat into our cluttered, mortgaged tombs, blindly waiting for the end.

A National Book Award finalist in 2006, Jess Walter will have a new novel, “The Financial Lives of the Poets’’ (Harper), released later this month.