We fall into in his pages, and if this sounds familiar, it should. New York is a gravy-stained, spit-flecked, bituminous, rough-necked, livid place that Doctorow lands the reader in Boss Tweed's city in 1871, at the precise moment the Tweed Ring is about to fall apart. Is the action, the principal character, the presiding genius and the trap of history.

New Rochelle and Manhattan in 'Ragtime' to the Jewish Bronx of his 1930's childhood in 'World's Fair.' But in 'The Waterworks,' New York is no longer a setting for the action: it Doctorow's novels have been, to some degree, documents of New York history, and one of his greatest strengths has been the richness of his descriptions of its cultural landscape, from turn-of-the-century Of towers, and wanted to have the populations of the dead and the living mingle in one vast literary commotion.Īlmost all of Mr. It is as though, descending at La Guardia Airport, he saw the welcome mat of the cemeteries in Queens, extending all the way to the horizon Novel of ideas, an allegory of vitality, mortality and the manipulation of nature. Of the genre - a body that refuses to stay dead, an incredulous storyteller sucked into the Perilous Pursuit of Truth, an omniscient, laconic and socially awkward policeman - his book is actually designed to be a heavyweight For although he uses all the classic devices Doctorow makes his narrator, a newspaper editor named McIlvaine, insist, this is no ghost story. This is not to say that 'The Waterworks' is mere Gotham Gothic. Doctorow has truly exhumed are the remains of the 19th-century genre of the science-detection mystery, originated by Poe and richly developed by Bierce and

Spellbinding new novel, 'The Waterworks.' But what Mr.

An exhumation also plays an important part in E. 'One Summer Night,' one of Ambrose Bierce's most wicked short stories: two pages long, a coffin-side view of an exhumation. He fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince.' Thus begins JNew York, Gaslight Necropolis By SIMON SCHAMA

The Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow