When all is said and done, "The Waterworks" basically turns out to be a silly mystery/detective novel about a mad scientist set in New York City during the corrupt regime of Boss Tweed. In short, the mad scientist here takes rich old people's money for the promise of immortality. There's alot of other blabbering going on about other topics (i.e. corruption, poverty, governement's influence over the press, orphanages) but these topics are given better and more detailed treatment in other novels. The story gets going (and starts falling apart) when a freelance journalist searches for his late father who he thinks he saw in a horse carriage with other old men (SPOILER ALERT!!! HE DID!! The mad scientist, for some completely unrevealed reason, decides to take his thought-to-be deceased old rich men on carriage rides in the City!! You would think that, at the very least, he would hang curtains over the windows in order to keep secret his nefarious plans). In turn, the city editor of the newspaper he mostly freelances for then searches for his freelancer, eventually partnering up with the one honest city detective.

Anyway, Doctorow is quite a good writer and evokes a creepy atmosphere, but it was all rather too silly, not to mention the fact that Doctorow has fallen in love with one type of punctuation ... the elipses ... which he spatters on every page ... to signify a ... pause.

The Waterworks didn't work for me. A better similar story could have been written by Lovecraft or Poe.

I've read almost all of E.L. DOCTOROW'S work and especially enjoyed WELCOME TO HARDTIMES and THE WATERWORKS . The latter book is intriguing and artfully written .

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.

Certainly, we know there was a Boss Tweed. We know about the corrupt world he lived in. And, we know there was a waterworks. But, what about the rest? Does it add up? Is it the "immense, extraordinary achievement" that the San Francisco Chronicle says it is?
Because we are dealing with E.L. Doctorow, the novel at first has the ring of real history. From the very first page, the author gives you that "You are there" style he made famous in Ragtime. It's a technique that can put you smack on the rough streets of old New York, where homeless newsboys fight each other for the "rights" to a corner, where dangerous horse carriages careen wildly down cobbled stoned streets, and where evil men, protected by Boss Tweed himself, ply their villainy with paid for impunity.
But, alas, the characters in The Waterworks are not nearly as interesting or believable as those in Ragtime. Perhaps it's the fact that Ragtime is peopled with real historical characters, that makes it a compelling work. Then again, perhaps, Doctorow is not really the mastermind of fiction the Chronicle claims he is. Or perhaps, he just blew this one.
In our view, The Waterworks is definitely not "Doctorow at his best" as proclaimed by the Philadelphia Enquirer, nor is it the "gem of a novel" heralded by the Boston Globe.

E.L. Doctorow's "The Waterworks" is a fictional portrait of the novelist's favorite locale, Manhattan, this time in the early 1870s. Limbless Civil War veterans beg for coins, poor children press wilted flowers in the hands of passersby, and on streets filled with broughams and drays, an omnibus carries a stiff-looking seated man recognized by a brooding freelance writer as his supposedly dead father.

I almost wanted to write this review in the spirit of the great Count Floyd from "SCTV," who always had to introduce these stinker horror films by pretending they were frightening beyond belief. "How about that scene where he sees his father with all the other zombies in that carriage? Wasn't that scary, kids? Or the part when the mad doctor is there in the lab cutting open that dead body. Oohhhh. I get shivers just thinking about it, kids, don't you?"

Doctorow deserves more respect. He's stepping out here, playing with a horror element in his usual realistic historical fiction. Since belief in the supernatural is not a Doctorow hallmark, he has to find some alternate means of creating that same kind of mood, and so presents us with a man, one Dr. Sartorius, who believes science affords all the answers to life's mysteries, a belief he pursues with amoral gusto.

"Philosophy poses the right questions," he explains. "But it lacks the requisite diction for the answers. Only Science can find the diction for the answers."

I especially like that last passage because there are no ellipses in it. There are a lot of these ...-style punctuations running through the narrative, I think as a nod to the period's newspaper style (the narrator is an editor) as well as Walt Whitman, New York City's great bard of the time. But it is repeated well past the point of tolerance.

More fatal is a story that never really gels. A good set-up is presented, the writer seeing his father on the omnibus and then disappearing himself, but the narrator seems to treat the mystery's unraveling with obscure detachment, something a policeman friend of his takes on and leaves him out of while he ponders what it all means from the sidelines. Most damagingly, Dr. Sartorius and his great scheme, when we finally come face-to-face with both, are disappointing and half-baked.

More interesting to Doctorow is the metaphysical significance of the story, the delineation of the epistemological limits of a time when Darwin had just come on the scene and conventional religion was scurrying to retrench. It's interesting the son and the father both have the same last name as the protagonist of Doctorow's later, more religion-focused "City of God," set in New York in the present day. But the religious and philosophical ideas presented here carry no weight, because Dr. Sartorius, the modern man of science who seeks to replace both, is confusingly presented.

It's also a dry, largely humorless book, odd given how vigorously and enjoyably Doctorow presented history in "Billy Bathgate" and "Ragtime," two books everyone should try to read once. Doctorow's abilities are enough to generate some interest with every new chapter, but "The Waterworks" lacks the kind of passion and engagement one expects from this brilliant creator.

I would have liked this book had Doctorow let himself go more, created a more purposely spinechilling account that laid off the Henry James in favor of the more ghoulish Poe. Instead we get a very draggy book, relieved only occasionally by Doctorow's eye for detail. But had he made "The Waterworks" more of a departure from straight history, even worked in the kind of "Creature Feature" vibe Count Floyd would have liked, this could well have been a much better book.

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.