Contemporary Literary Criticism | Doctorow, E. L. - Michael Wutz (review date Spring 1995)

Michael Wutz (review date Spring 1995)

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...

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