Customer Reviews

Waterworks

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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

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.

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

Apologies for the awful pun, but I think a little someting is needed to counterbalance the ponderous over-readings that have been in some of the reviews.

To my mind, Doctorow is, in this novel utterly successful in what he sets out to do, the only problem is whether or not what he is doing is something you want to read.

I feel it is unfair to suggest that this novel is in any way attempting to be a "Gravity's Rainbow", when it seems clear that this book is something of a literary joke. It is much less that "Gravity's Rainbow", because it never aims to be anything comparable (and those of us who appreciate a novel that isn't as preciously over-stated as that one will breathe a sigh of relief).

Doctorow aims here to create a Gothic melodrama, and, using twentieth century writing techniques to show both the flaws and the strengths of the period piece. Those who despised the ending, I would send back to Poe, and ask them to find any of his stories in which the ending doesn't look tacked on, or "incomplete" as one review has it.

Doctorow succeeds utterly in giving us a piece of 19th century popular literature, my problem is that I don't feel the form he has chosen has given him the scope to examine his strengths. It is a wonderful book, having a wonderful atmosphere and respect for his souce material, but I miss the raging Doctorow of "The Book of Daniel" or "Lives of the Poets". In my view, he is one of the best novelists of men, and the impotence we can feel. that is present here, but never exploited as it is to such good effect in his other books.

This is a good book, but not a great one, and, unfortunately, not one of his best.

With THE WATERWORKS, E.L. Doctorow has written a fascinating literary mystery which peels back the layers of a late 1800's New York City. A young freelance writer, Martin Pemberton, disappears after revealing that he believes he has seen his supposedly dead father. His editor - McIlvaine and the narrator of the book - takes it upon himself to uncover the mystery surrounding the young man's disappearance. As McIlvaine enters the seedy underworld of New York in pursuit of the young genius writer and the legacy of dishonesty his father has left him, he discovers more than he has bargained for. Doctorow vividly evokes a New York of a different era, and, in the process, creates a force of setting that becomes a character in its own right.

Doctorow is an excellent writer who adapts his style to his subject matter. Unfortunately, as other reviewers have noted, the stylistic quirk of ellipses gets annoying and more frequent as the novel progresses. Doctorow may have chosen this style of punctuation to imply that much in McIlvaine's New York was unspoken, implied, unfinished - but, even if that was the case, it doesn't serve to do much more than make the reader want to tear the words out of the narrator. Despite this flaw, I thoroughly enjoyed this Doctorow novel, which, while not his best, certainly compares favorably with his body of work.

I recommend THE WATERWORKS for serious readers of literary and historical fiction.

This is one of the few books that I had to read twice to fully understand. The plot is complex and builds upon itself really well. The characters are admirable, and the story is well plotted with the history of New York. An excellent book, I do not think it gets the recognition it deserves. I recommend it to any intellectual fiction reader

I recently finished the audio version of this book, well-read by veteran actor Sam Waterston, and have to say that while I enjoyed Doctorow's portrait of 1870's New York City I thought there was some sizeable gaps in the plot.

Without giving away too much of the story, the novel is narrated by a NYC newspaper editor, whose main "free lance" reporter Martin Pemberton has recently disappeared. Martin is young, engaged to be married, and is the son of the late Augustus Pemberton, who is alleged to have made his fortune in slave trading and price-gouging during the Civil War. After Martin confronts his father in a scathing school essay, he is ultimately disinherited. Now, shortly before Martin disappears, he tells McIlvaine (the narrator editor) that he saw his late father riding in a great coach in Manhattan.

That all seems spooky and mysterious enough, and Doctorow skillfully reveals secrets as the story unfolds, but for me the real beauty of the novel is the depiction of NYC in the 1870's, dominated by Boss Tweed and his corrupt municipal police force, judges, senators, etc. At the time of the novel Tweed's influence is starting to slip a little, and towards the end Tweed's exploits in Cuba, which had little to do with the story, were nonetheless entertaining. However like many aspects of the plot, the political network and influence of Tweed was touched upon fairly superficially, without a lot of detail to enjoy.

Everything is tied up quite nicely at the end, perhaps a little too abruptly, but I was a little confused as to certain aspects of the novel. What exactly happened to Martin, as opposed to the kids at the orphanage? Why was the police informer who robbed the paperboys killed?

In any event, for those of you who like historical novels, The Waterworks may appeal to you and certainly had some fascinating passages. Doctorow is a skilled writer, even when not at his best. If you haven't read anything by this author though, I would start with Billy Bathgate or maybe Ragtime first.

about more than whodunit. E.L. Doctorow is really smart, so he doesn't write the run-of-the-mill mystery.

The Waterworks is more about ideas - a society's obligation to confront politcal corruption, ethical questions that arise as humankind's scientific knowledge advances, the ethical obligations of journalists - than the mystery of why a young man has disappeared and if he's dead or alive.

Doctorow captures the atmosphere of New York City of the 1870s. His characters, esp. the narrator McIlvaine and the Police Captain, are complicated and intriging.

Doctorow's novel The Waterworks is an impressive historical novel that I would recommend to anyone interested in reading about New York in the latter part of the 19th century. The imagining of post-Civil War New York is quite striking. Other readers have stated that the characters are not quite as mesmerizing as others in period crime fiction like those in Caleb Carr's The Alienist, but the narrator of Doctorow's book eloquently conveys the cultural sensibilities of an era when Boss Tweed was king and New York was a work in progress. Obviously, comparisons between The Waterworks and The Alienist are logical and while I would recommend Caleb Carr's novel about a slightly later period to anyone who likes a great story, I would argue that Doctorow crafts a stylistic gem that will attract less of the same readers but the book merits praise and showcases the underbelly of a city in transformation. To understand the legacies of Lincoln and Tweed and chart the rise of the daily newspaper, the novel admirably succeeds.

The setting is New York City in 1871. Boss Tweed and his Ring rule the city. The narrator, a newspaper editor named McIlvaine, finds that his best free-lance reporter, Martin Pemberton, has disappeared. He enlists the help of the one police captain who has not been corrupted, Edmund Donne. Together they gradually uncover an elaborate operation in which the fluids of riffraff children of the streets are collected and transfused into very old and wealthy men to keep keep them from dying. The mastermind behind the operation is Dr. Wrede Sartorius, who seems to be a hybrid of the fictional Dr. Frankenstein and the historical Dr. Mengele. (Doctorow's later novel, "The March", featured a younger Dr. Sartorius as a brilliant physician serving the Union Army.)

So THE WATERWORKS is a gothic mystery, at least on the surface. I read somewhere that in writing it, E.L. Doctorow was paying tribute to Edgar Allen Poe, whom Doctorow's father had honored by naming his son "Edgar". I have not read any Poe in decades, so I can't really comment on how successful a simulation THE WATERWORKS is. The novel does remind me, at least in rough outline or structure, of a Sherlock Holmes tale: the narrator (McIlvaine) becomes sidekick to a tall, gangly, highly intelligent detective (Donne), who eventually works out the scheme of a brilliant but morally bereft Moriarty (Dr. Sartorius).

But in THE WATERWORKS, Doctorow is not as successful as Conan Doyle or (to the extent I remember his tales) Poe. The story is not resolved satisfactorily, perhaps because Doctorow seems to try for more than simply telling a story in the form of a gothic mystery. He interjects numerous comments on big themes such as journalism, science, God, the Gilded Age, and civilization, and I sense that through them he is trying to elevate the novel to "literature". But for the most part the various portentous comments are left dangling by themselves. They are never drawn together so that at the end the reader (or at least this reader) could identify one, two, or three as themes or messages of the novel.

With one regrettable exception, the novel is very well-written, which is the feature that sustained my interest. The exception is Doctorow's repeated and annoying use of ellipses to signal pauses in the narration as the narrator searches his mind for the more properly nuanced word or a palatable euphemism.

I bought THE WATERWORKS when it was published in 1994 but had never got around to reading it. I recently re-read "Ragtime", which I once again found to be a minor masterpiece of American fiction. Doing so spurred me to take THE WATERWORKS down from the shelf. It turns out to be nowhere near the novel that "Ragtime" is. Three-and-a-half stars.