Contemporary Literary Criticism | Doctorow, E. L. - Simon Schama (review date 19 June 1994)

Simon Schama (review date 19 June 1994)

SOURCE: "New York, Gaslight Necropolis," in New York Times Book Review, June 19, 1994, p. 1.

[In the following review, Schama focuses on the historical aspects of The Waterworks.]

"The 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 "One Summer Night," one of Ambrose Bierce's most wicked short stories: two pages long, a coffin-side view of an exhumation. An exhumation also plays an important part in E. L. Doctorow's startling and spellbinding new novel, The Waterworks. But what Mr. 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 Wilkie Collins.

This is not to say that The Waterworks is mere Gotham Gothic. As Mr. Doctorow makes his narrator, a newspaper editor named McIlvaine,...

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