SOURCE: "Necropolis News," in New Republic, Vol. 211, Nos. 3 & 4, July 18, 1994, pp. 44, 46-8.

[In the following review, Delbanco presents an appreciation of the symbolic features of The Waterworks and comments briefly on the essay collection Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution.]

Everybody's favorite stage set this year has been old New York. It first turned up in Martin Scorsese's movie of The Age of Innocence, which made viewers feel as if they were inside a meticulously accurate diorama of Edith Wharton's fashionable Manhattan in the 1870s. Then Caleb Carr enlarged the set for his murder mystery of the 1890s. The Alienist, to include the wharves and the dark alleys where Wharton's grandees would never venture. Now E. L. Doctorow has returned to the immediate post-Civil War period for his own New York tale.

If the setting of The Waterworks is similar, Doctorow's way of representing it is entirely different. This is a writer who—ever since the first chapter of his first book, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), in which we meet a character known simply as "the Bad Man"—has been committed less to realism than to a kind of allegorical romance. Descended from the line of American fabulists that runs from Hawthorne to Malamud, Doctorow has always disavowed what Hawthorne (referring to the conventional fiction of his day) dismissed as "minute fidelity … to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience," in favor of a more imaginative "latitude … to mingle the Marvellous" with the real.

Late in The Waterworks, Doctorow sums up the dream effect he is after:

There are moments of our life that are something like breaks or tears in moral consciousness, as caesuras break the chanted line, and the eye sees through the breach to a companion life, a life in all its aspects the same, running along parallel in time, but within a universe even more confounding than our own. It is this other disordered existence … that our ministers warn us against … that our dreams perceive.

To catch this "disordered existence" in fiction, the logic of the work must be more associative than sequential. Accordingly, the speech of the narrator is continually interrupted by ellipses that give his sentences a fractured quality and seem to represent a habitual pause—a hesitancy to deliver consecutive thoughts. "There is a difference," he remarks, "between living in some kind of day-to-day crawl through chaos, where there is no hierarchy to your thoughts, but a raucous equality of them, and knowing in advance the whole conclusive order … which makes narration … suspect." Yet, at the same time, a fiction that takes seriously this suspicion must commit itself to achieving something like the fluent exfoliation of images that one expects from poetry.

In the case of Doctorow's new novel, the images are those of a city closer to one of Red Groom's cartoonish ensembles than to any actual New York. Doctorow calls this city a "necropolis." Its "paving stones pound … with horse-droppings," while carrion birds swoop in between the carts and carriages, "picking out their meals" from the dung. Wooden remnants of the antebellum town are being literally burned away ("we had fire all the time, we burned as a matter of habit") and replaced by the city of iron and stone that survives today in patches of cast-iron buildings, mainly below Houston Street. This New York was already the "huge jagged city" that Henry James would describe at the turn of the century as "… looking at the sky in the manner of some colossal hair-comb turned upward and so deprived of half its teeth that the others, at their uneven intervals, count doubly as sharp spikes."

This is the gothic setting for a story that, briefly told, sounds outlandish. It begins with a tycoon named Augustus Pemberton, who grew rich during the War of Secession by abetting death itself—by "supplying the Army of the North with boots that fell apart, blankets that dissolved in rain, tents that tore at the grommets and uniform cloth that bled dye." Under sentence of death from pernicious anemia, he tells his family that he is going to an Adirondack spa to seek a cure. There he—apparently—dies. With due Episcopal ceremony, he is seemingly buried. But his estranged son, a free-lance journalist—one "of that postwar generation for whom the materials of the war were ironic objects of art or fashion," who "walk[s] down Broadway with his Union greatcoat open, flowing behind him like a cape"—thinks he sees his father alive.

The startled young man, Martin Pemberton, is one of those whom Whitman had in mind when he wrote, in 1870, that "the aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of." A believer turned ironist, he produces caustic book reviews and half-fawning, half-mocking articles for the society page in which he enumerates the carats in the ladies' diamonds. Now, suddenly, he becomes the credulous object of scorn, surrounded by doubters. One stormy morning, while on his way up Broadway to deliver a review, he encounters a city omnibus carrying a group of pale old men who sit eerily still, oblivious to the lurches of the carriage and the bursts of lightning and the pedestrian shouts and traffic gongs. Peering in the carriage windows at its ghostly passengers, he sees that one of them has "the familiar hunch of his father's shoulders … and the wizened Augustan neck with its familiar wen, the smooth white egglike structure that from Martin's infancy had always alarmed him."

Most people dismiss Martin's report as fantasy or hoax, though a few take him seriously and even grope toward an explanatory idea of the Oedipal unconscious (everyone knows he loathed his father) to account for his delusion. When Martin himself disappears, his soft-boiled editor, McIlvaine—whose "newsman's cilia [are] up and waving" at the smell of a good story—joins the chase to find out what, if anything, his young free-lance has really seen. After some further twists and turns the road of detection leads to a Mephistophelian character named Doctor Sartorius, who is a cross between one of Hawthorne's mad scientists and one of Poe's reclusive aesthetes. Ahead of Pasteur and Koch, he has intuited the germ basis of disease. He has transfused blood and is preparing to perform organ transplants. We discover him deep within the massive stone structure of the waterworks at a suburban reservoir, where, in a sort of futuristic bunker, he rests untried technologies on patients (including Augustus Pemberton) so rich and desperate that they are willing to try anything, pay anything, to forestall death. The medicines that Sartorius administers are derived from fluids extracted from children. "Shrunken, unnaturally darkened and sunk in on themselves, like vegetable husks," these old men have literally become vampires, feeding on the blood of the young.

No symbolic fiction can be fairly described by summarizing its plot (Moby Dick, in paraphrase, becomes a ridiculous story about a ship captain chasing the whale that ate his leg); and so it is difficult to convey the "sulphurous" atmosphere of Doctorow's book. The seed of his strange fable had been growing in his mind since he published a short story in Lives of the Poets in 1984, in which two men find a toy boat capsized in a reservoir, and discover the body of a drowned child in the adjacent waterworks. Now, in the novel that emerged from this image ten years later, the figure of the lost child is kaleidoscopically multiplied into clusters of "undersized beings on whose faces were etched the lines and shadows of serfdom." One of them turns up in what is supposed to be Augustus Pemberton's coffin (which Martin, in a half-parodic graveyard scene, digs up and pries open in the dark of night), laid out within on a "padded white silk couch," its "tiny leathered face with its eyes closed and lips pursed." These doomed children function in the novel as symbols of the age when, for the first time, American civilization began to produce more human refuse than it could dispose of or hide away:

Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Ragpicking was a profession…. Out on the edges of town, along the North River or in Washington Heights or on the East River islands, behind stone walls and high hedges, were our institutions of charity, our orphanages, insane asylums, poorhouses, schools for the deaf and dumb and mission homes for magdalens. They made a sort of Ringstrasse for our venerable civilization.

As for those who stay within the ring, they scratch out a living as messengers, peddlers, shopsweepers, hawkers, newsboys and involuntary whores:

More than one brothel specialized in them. They often turned up in hospital wards and church hospices so stunned by the abuses to which they'd been subjected that they couldn't speak sensibly but could only cower in their rags and gaze upon the kindest nurses or ministrants of charity with abject fear.

In imagining this world of brutalized children, Doctorow wants to drive home—sometimes relentlessly—its affinity with our own age. A purposeful war has just ended ("I am a man," says McIlvaine, who narrates the story in the first-person voice, "who will never be able to think of anyone but Abe Lincoln as president"), and has given way to "a conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect … all aglitter in a setting of mass misery."

The men who have taken over this postwar America have, like the arbitrageurs of a century later, no "loyalty … to any one business, but to the art of buying and selling them." Pallid and glazed-eyed, the old men whose dying is retarded by Dr. Sartorius have a zombie inertness that seems the final stage in the natural course of their lives—lives that have been spent in a moral obtuseness that, when they were young, might have taken the form of insouciance or arrogance or blinding greed. The parasitism of their dying is not fundamentally different from how they lived: as blood-suckers indifferent to the human cost of their getting and spending. Augustus Pemberton, for example, is rumored to have been financially involved, even during the war, in the slave trade.

That Doctorow conceived this fantastic novel as a sort of moral prehistory of our own age becomes clear when one dips into the essays that he collected under the centerless title Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution, while The Waterworks was taking form. In the introduction to this rather haphazard collection, he likens the impact of Reaganism on American society—deregulation, the politicization of the courts and the distribution of "the enormous costs of the cold war democratically among all classes of society except the wealthiest"—to "the effect … [of] a vampire's arterial suck." Another essay, a meditation on nineteenth-century New York written for Architectural Digest in 1992, contains blocks of descriptive writing that are reiterated, verbatim, in McIlvaine's voice.

Doctorow's implicit subject in these pieces seems to be the end of our "fifty-year nuclear alert" and its replacement by a restless waiting for some yet-to-be-defined menace that might revive a sense of common purpose. We live, he believes, in a "stillness between tides, neither going out nor coming in," bewildered to the point of paralysis about how to deal, for instance, with the thousands of people in our midst "sleeping in doorways, begging with Styrofoam cups." One suspects that he also had in mind for The Waterworks the increasingly evident possibility that—for those able to pay—medical technology may someday sustain almost indefinitely a grotesque simulacrum of life.

Many of Doctorow's points border on cant. He is not an essayist. The most arresting piece in this collection is the least discursive. It is the one that was not commissioned—a brief rumination called "Standards," about the "self-referential power" of songs. A charming imaginative frolic, it moves among associated topics that include the origins of lullabies in mothers' crooning, the mixture of irony and militancy in wartime songs like "Goober Peas," the "compensatory" function of ballads about lost love. But when, in the other essays, he turns away from the associative mode and becomes resolutely expository in the service of an argument, he tends to sound callow and even pontifical. Here is a piece written before the 1992 election out of disgust at George Bush and with high hopes for Bill Clinton:

The true president would have the strength to widen the range of current political discourse, and would love and revere language as the best means we have to close on reality. That implies a sensibility attuned to the immense moral consequence of every human life. Perhaps even a sense of tragedy that would not let him sleep the night through.

Weakened by this mixture of outrage and sentimentality, the essays are more an expression of an offended sensibility than a serious effort at political analysis or understanding. They have a thin, sloganeering quality—and, finally, a columnist's transience. But when, in The Waterworks, the same sentiments are realized as images and put to use within the context of a story of loss and rescue, they work to greater effect. "I have dreamt sometimes." says McIlvaine.

… that if it were possible to lift this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth … and all its torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables—all of it, like a scab from new skin underneath—how seedlings would sprout, and freshets bubble up, and brush and grasses would grow over the rolling hills…. A season or two of this and the mute, protesting culture buried for so many industrial years under the tenements and factories … would rise again … of the lean, religious Indians of the bounteous earth…. Such love I have for those savage polytheists of my mind … such envy for the inadequate stories they told each other, their taxonomies, cosmologies … their lovely dreams of the world they stood on and who was holding it up….

In earlier works, like Loon Lake (1980) and World's Fair (1985), Doctorow indulged in this kind of reverie at the expense of narrative momentum. But in The Waterworks, he has pulled off the difficult literary trick of combining the grit and pith of a precisely located fiction with the reach of a moral exemplum independent of time and place. When, in the essays, Doctorow asks us to "pray for the dead and for the maligned and destitute," it feels as if we are being dunned for the annual charitable appeal. But when, in The Waterworks, he concentrates his pity and horror into images rather than arguments, the result is a persuasive portrait of an era akin to our own, when Americans found themselves living in cities of unprecedented scale, in which, for the first time, human beings had become indistinguishable from litter.