E. L. Doctorow Critical Essay | Critical Review by Michael Wutz

SOURCE: A review of The Waterworks, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 177-78.

In the following review, Wutz outlines the elements of The Waterworks and considers its place in Doctorow's oeuvre.

An almost uncanny ability to reconstruct historical material and a spellbinding facility to tell a good tale—these are the qualities that have made E. L. Doctorow one of America's most distinguished literary practitioners and the qualities that are again evident in The Waterworks, a fascinating science-detection mystery centered in post-bellum New York City. Framed by the atmospherics of a city bulging out of its seams, the novel tells the story of young Martin Pemberton, a caustic free-lance literary critic, who claims to have seen his deceased father in a city omnibus. The ensuing search, told in the form of a memoir by a newspaper editor named McIlvaine, plunges Martin into the city's dark...
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