I've very much enjoyed the two other novels of historical fiction by Doctorow that I've read ([The March] and [Ragtime]), but this one was a disappointment. It was very slow to start, and the affected writing style, including.... way too many... ellipses was ... distracting. The plot is interesting, and the portrait of New York City in the post-Civil War period was vivid, but I mostly felt bored every time I picked it up. ( )

Great evocation of NY during the Tweed era, coupled with an odd fantasy of scientific callousness, longing for eternal life, cruelty, and an old man's reminiscences. ( )

A stylized period piece that reads like a blend of the classic mysteries from the late 19th century and Edgar Allen Poe’s tales of the macabre. ( )

It's easy enough to read, but I had a little difficulty at first in developing an interest. But it came soon enough.

The narrator, McIlvaine, is a newspaperman. An editor at the start of the story, he works with my "freelances", as he call s them. The story takes place in the 1870s, although the narrator is recalling it from many years later.

One of the freelances is Martin Pemberton. Martin was disowned by his father, struck out of his will, for stating his belief that his father was a greedy SOB, although not in those exact words. Martin didn't care about money in any case and was happy to be on call for newspaper work. He became, in fact, the narrator's favorite, as he wrote well and reliably.

Then came the time Martin disappeared. McIlvaine made inquiries and learned that Martin had been telling others that he had seen his father - his dead father - in a carriage being driven down the street. He was among other old men. Although he'd not been close to his father, Martin was shaken by the image and compelled to figure out what he had seen and why.

And so, eventually, was McIlvaine. The answer is then the subject of the story. Quite a strange one it is, one dipping into medical sci fi and featuring a brilliant but amoral doctor.

I found it absorbing and odd enough to make me think a bit. ( )

The best historical novels read as if they were written in the time they are being written about. It can’t be easy to create that illusion, while at the same time producing a story contemporary readers can appreciate, understand and identify with. E.L. Doctorow does all this nicely in his 1994 novel “The Waterworks.”

Doctorow’s narrator is McIlvaine, a now aged newspaperman remembering his best story, one he couldn’t dare tell in his newspaper back in the 1870s when it all occurred. Now, after so many years, it doesn’t matter whether anyone believes it or not.

Martin Pemberton, a freelance or what we would today call a freelancer, mentions one day that he has seen his father. No big deal, except for the fact that his father, Augustus Pemberton (a wealthy, disreputable businessman) is dead and buried. McIlvaine assumes his reporter is just mistaken, until Martin disappears and the newsman learns that when the old man’s grave is opened the body of a boy is found inside. To help find Martin, McIlvaine enlists the services of one of the few honest cops in New York City during the Boss Tweed era, Capt. Edmund Donne. When they find Martin he is being held captive in, of all places, an orphanage.

The shocking story Martin later tells involves a mad doctor of the Doctor Moreau school of medicine who convinces dying old men of great wealth to, in exchange for passing that wealth on to him, gain, if not immortality, at least extra years of blissful existence as guinea pigs in a great scientific experiment. How the doctor makes use of the orphans is another part of the horror.

Other writers might have taken Doctorow’s plot, doubled the length of the novel (Doctorow’s goes barely 250 pages), added more deaths and sex and shocks, and gotten a bestseller in the horror genre. Doctorow earned his bestseller with an understated literary novel in which most of the horror comes secondhand. For someone like me who doesn’t go for horror anyway, secondhand is more than good enough. ( )