[In the following review of The Waterworks, Shechner takes account of the novel's strengths and failings.]

The germ of The Waterworks is a four-page vignette of the same title that appeared in E. L. Doctorow's Lives of the Poets (1984). In that sketch the body of a drowned child is plucked from a reservoir, presumably the Croton in New York's Central Park, and whisked away in a horse-drawn carriage, while the silent narrator looks on.

I am fond of Lives of the Poets, the least celebrated of Doctorow's books, because it pretends to be nothing more than it is, a book of etudes for the left hand. Doctorow's troubles begin where the ambition swells and etudes get inflated into historical novels—mournful fanfares given a social/historical spin. That was the problem with Ragtime; so it is with The Waterworks.

Another of Doctorow's crabbed rhapsodies to New York City, The Waterworks is set in 1871. Its nominal plot is the search for a missing book reviewer, Martin Pemberton, among the streets of New York, webbed with intrigue and thuggery under the reign of William Marcy "Boss" Tweed.

Pemberton's editor, one McIlvaine, knows him only as the best of his free-lancers and "a moody distracted young fellow." Pemberton is also son of one of the city's robber barons, the late Augustus Pemberton, who ran slaves into Cuba as late as the 1860s and made a killing in the Civil War selling "boots that fell apart, blankets that dissolved in the rain" and such to the Army of the North. For that, his funeral catafalque was marched up Broadway, and the city was draped in black muslin.

When Martin disappears shortly after announcing that he has seen his father still alive, McIlvaine sets out on the trail, accompanied by a police captain, one of the few who is not in Boss Tweed's employ, Edmund Donne. This serves to get us into the city, a gaslit phantasmagoria of ambition and squalor.

Donne and McIlvaine go about like Watson and Holmes, rounding up the usual suspects. Martin's landlord complains of unpaid rent; his lady friend, Emily Tisdale, complains of unpaid attention; his mother complains of her husband's disappearing fortune. Harry Wheelwright, an impecunious artist, was last to see Martin alive; Dr. Thaddeus Mott, had diagnosed Augustus Pemberton with "irreversible anemia" and then lost track of him when a Dr. Sartorius was called in on the case.

Wheelwright's is the critical, if predictable, testimony. He and Martin Pemberton had dug up the casket of Martin's father and found the body within was that of a young boy. Fingers point toward Augustus Pemberton's bookkeeper; toward Sartorius, a renegade medicine man; toward an orphanage and to various and sundry thugs.

The last third of the novel features a triple unraveling so dizzying that the reader may need Dramamine. All pretense of social realism collapses into a Gothic fantasia that grinds urban bossism into crypto medicine, zomboid tycoons and organs harvested from the dead. At this Doctorow hurls his most gorgeous prose, as if he were turning up the soundtrack to distract us from the gore and a plot in which anything goes.

Here, for example, is the discovery of Sartorius' "conservatory," "an indoor park, with gravel paths and planting and cast-iron benches … all set inside a vaulted roof of glass and steel…."

"The effect … was of a Roman bath, had Rome been industrialized. The greenish light from the conservatory roof seemed to descend, it sifted down, it had motion, it seemed to pulse. Gradually I became aware that I was hearing music. First I felt it as a pulse in the air … but when I realized it was music, it broke over me, swelling and filling this vaulted place…. It was as if I had stepped into another universe, a Creation, like … an obverse Eden."

Boss Tweed's New York is material that any novelist-cum-urban historian might long to dirty his hands with. But since his one great novel, The Book of Daniel, Doctorow has adopted a clean hands strategy, side-stepping character development in favor of special effects. Thus McIlvaine, this book's central figure, is only a cipher, much like his predecessor in Doctorow's last novel, Billy Bathgate.

As for Boss Tweed himself, McIlvaine describes him as "a big ruddy son of a bitch, he ran about three hundred pounds. Bald and red-bearded, with a charming twinkle in his blue eyes. He bought the drinks and paid for the dinners. But in the odd moment when there was no hand to shake or toast to give, the eye went dead and you saw the soul of a savage."

Oh, for more of that, for there was the promise of this novel: that massive son of a bitch with the soul of a savage.