Doctorow, E. L. - John Whitworth (review date 28 May 1994)
John Whitworth (review date 28 May 1994)
SOURCE: "A Wonderful Town, Even Then," in Spectator, Vol. 272, No. 8655, May 28, 1994, p. 33.
[In the following review, Whitworth informs the reader of the style and thematic concerns of The Waterworks.]
The Waterworks is a marvellous book, gathering such momentum that I read the last 120 pages in one go at four o'clock in the morning. Doctorow has given us a novel of the prelapsarian state, a late 19th-century novel, something out of Conrad and James, out of Stevenson and Wells and Conan Doyle. Of course it's a bit of a cheek, taking this American for our own, for this is a book about New York in the years after Lincoln's assassination. And perhaps Doctorow would prefer to make his bow to Theodore Dreiser (on whom he has written two fine essays); he quotes F. O. Mathiessen—Dreiser was "virtually the first major American writer whose family name was not English or Scotch-Irish." And...
[The entire page is 807 words long]
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