The Waterworks (1994)

Book Circle Reads 21

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: “An elegant page-turner of nineteenth-century detective fiction.”
–The Washington Post Book World

One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton, a freelance writer, sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of The New York Times, “a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past.”

My Review: Mel-O-Drama!! The novel is set in 1871, and like any good sudser pits one lone man against a system of evildoers and manipulators. Adding to the pleasures are steampunky elements like technology out of its time, a villainous doctor aiming to create immortal men, and double-super-secret hidden bases that are in plain sight.

When I read this for my book circle, I was taken with the plot and somewhat flat on the wiritng. Doctorow makes wonderful sentences at his best, specifically thinking of Ragtime here, but this book fell short of the mark for me then. A quick flip-through to blow fifteen years of cobwebs off my memories didn’t so much refute my earlier contention as show me how very spoiled I was by the olden-days craft of editing. If I read a novel this well-made today, I’d yodel from the housetops and dance mazurkas of rapture down the middle of the parkway.

People who have read my reviews for a while might recall how UP I was over The Night Circus, and how much I loved it. So in that context, I say this: Had The Night Circus been edited as well as this far, far less extraordinary book (published in 1994) was, I think I would simply have melted into the fabric of the cosmos from sheer bliss.

Skills are being lost. It is NOT a good thing. I grow sadder with every mediocre book I read that someone somewhere with the talent and ability to edit even the ~meh~ into BETTER ~meh~ isn’t getting the chance, the training, the mentoring, to do so. ( )

To call Doctorow’s writing merely “atmospheric” is to do the man a disservice. He places his reader squarely in the center of a room and constructs an entire world, like a stage set, around him. Lighting is carefully considered – green light filtering through murky glass, flickering-orange candlelight in a decrepit mansion or the gray, wet darkness of a downpour at night. Doctorow encases the reader in words.

How to classify this novel…a mystery? a horror? literary suspense? steampunk or magical realism? It’s difficult to say. The Waterworks is told in the first person by McIlvaine, a newspaper editor not as far removed from Boss Tweed’s New York City as he’d have us believe. When his favorite freelancer appears at the newspaper office disheveled, wild-eyed and claiming to have seen his dead father in a public carriage, McIlvaine doesn’t think too much of it. But when that same freelancer goes missing McIlvaine is quick to realize that an exclusive story has fallen into his lap. He enlists the aid of the only honest cop left in the city, begins interviewing the missing man’s family and friends, and finds himself involved in a Penny dreadful mystery worthy of Wilkie Collins. But like Collins, Doctorow is always skirting the edge of the implausible and ridiculous – and so McIlvaine’s monotone accounting of events is here a boon.

The story is instilled with the feeling of hindsight. McIlvaine is telling his tale long after the events have taken place. He does a lot of second guessing and connecting of the dots. He struggles to understand what really happened – and to answer the more elusive question of why? He is first and foremost a newspaper man, and makes it clear from the start that at the time the events took place he was more interested in the story than the rescue of his missing freelancer. There’s a thread of guilt underlying his words. Did he do enough? Should he, could he, have done more? The Waterworks is a strange story being pieced together by a flawed man with an uncertain grasp of the facts.

For full review, go to: http://booksexy.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/the-waterworks-by-e-l-doctorow/ ( )

Martin Pemberton

this book suffered from me having previously read Caleb Carr's excellent novel "The Alienist". These two books hearken back to roughly the same time and place, and even share a plot structure of a newspapermen's recollection of a mystery long since solved, but Carr's story is so much more finely crafted, engaging, and dramatic that The Waterworks fares pretty poorly in comparison.

the disappearance of a freelance writer occasions little notice apart from his editor who embarks on the trail to discover his fate. this leads him through a strange warren of crackpot medicine, social darwinsim, and the quest for eternal youth.

the mystery lacks a certain momentum and urgency. i felt myself skimming pages and still feeling totally capable of grasping exactly what was happening later on. no great surprises in store at the end, and the resolution seemed to linger longer than it needed to.

for all of that Doctorow seems to be a capable enough storyteller with a decent command of language.
( )

Doctorow's best. ( )