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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mystery among the omnibuses, June 10, 2004
E.L. Doctorow's THE WATERWORKS is likely to draw comparisons to Caleb Carr's THE ALIENIST. That would be comparing apples to oranges. Carr's 19th Century novels are wonderfully plot-driven with somewhat rounded characters. Doctorow's mystery is more cerebral: to me the solution was less interesting than how the characters got to it. I'm not going to re-hash the plot; there are several other reviewers who have already done so. What I think needs to be addressed is Doctorow's uncanny ability, no matter which of his historical novels you read, to keep late 20th century values out of the minds and mouths of his characters. This is a temptation that's tough to resist, but Doctorow pulls it off every time, and especially here. Considering the narrator is a 19th Century writer (journalist actually), 20th Century Doctorow must have used supreme discipline to ring true to the era. A great virtuouso performance. Rocco Dormarunno, author of The Five Points
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Once Again Doctorow Delivers, September 26, 2005
In this novel set in New York City early in the 1870's, the Civil War has left its scar on society, even in the north. The city is filled with limbless ex-soldiers, begging on the streets, shooting morphine into their veins to satisfy the dead-end addiction they picked up in hospitals. In this society gripped by maliase, with its corrupt Grant Administration, the city-wide stranglehold of Boss Tweed, and looming bank collapses, a young newspaperman is confronted with a story too fantastic to be true. His friend has seen his evil tycoon father--a man months in the grave--riding through Manhattan's streets in broad daylight along with other old men, each supposedly long dead, all among the wealthiest individuals in America! The story unwraps from there to take us into the secret laboratory of a brilliant (though deliciously mad) scientist, a man of so far ahead of his time he accomplished feats of medical science unknown to us today in the 21st century. This novel of kidnapping, of faked demises, of medicine wedding science and of amoral genius squandered, is an atmospheric period thriller such as only E.L. Doctorow, New York's greatest living storyteller, could create.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Why the expansion of a great idea doesn't always work, July 6, 1997
By A Customer
I am a great E.L. Doctorow fan, and I love his ability to craft a tightly-woven historical narrative. I also love the way Doctorow can write in the first-person perspective, creating an empathy between reader and storyteller, as he did in "World's Fair" and "The Book of Daniel". In "The Waterworks," Doctorow creates a historical narravtive in the first person which tries to capture the essence of New York in the decade following the Civil War, and using a mystery as the hook to pull the reader in. As much as I am a fan of Doctorow's work, I have to say that here, he fails to pull it off. The narrator of the book, a newspaper editor named McIlvaine, tracks the disappearence of a brilliant young writer named Pemberton. Pemberton disappeared after seeing a "ghost" of his thought-to-be deceased father, who left his widow and children penniliess, despite amassing a large fortune throughout his life. The ensuing pursuit of the truth (as Pemberton chases his father and McIlvaine chases Pemberton) through the streets of a very different New York City are dazzling in their detail and electricity, but the fault lies in the execution of the story: Doctorow simply does not effectively keep the reader interested in the story, and thus it can get quite confusing at times. My suspicion is that Mr. Doctorow did not just come up with the story and then try to write a novel about it. My theory is that this novel is actually an expansion of an essay he wrote a couple of years before. "The Waterworks" was written in 1994. In 1992, Doctorow wrote an essay called "The Nineteenth New York," which is included in a collection of his essays entitled: "Jack London, Hemmingway, and the Constitution" [Random House, 1993]. Both the essay and "The Waterworks" contain a description of New York which use the same quote from Whitman ("Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!..."), and the same description of Newsboys "battling for their corners"; both describe Lincoln's funeral train travelling through the city in suspiciously similar ways. In my opinion, Doctorow liked the idea of "going back" to old New York, and used this story to do it. Therefore, the novel has an atmosphere, a gritty realism that only Doctorow could create, but strangely falls short in narrative, something Doctorow--almost--never does
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