[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 McIlvaine, plunges Martin into the city's dark underbelly and eventually brings him face to face with the "mad" German scientist, Dr. Wrede Sartorius, the genius responsible for his father's ostensible resurrection and the mastermind behind an ominous operation. Housed in the underworldly catacombs of the city's waterworks on Forty-second Street, Sartorius has established a factory of immortality, a medical facility in which body fluid injections taken from children give old geezers illusory glimpses of rejuvenation and eternal life.

If this sounds like the reworking of the stuff that nineteenth-century fictions are made of, it is meant that way: the omnipresent oppressiveness of the city, as well as the delightful circumlocution of the narrative, are reminiscent of Dickens; the morbid subject matter and intuitive brilliance of the police officer solving the case suggest Poe's Gothic ratiocination; and the scientific rivalry between Sartorius and his colleagues, as well as the search for the elixir of life, recall Hawthorne's hybristic scientists. These are just a few of the literary voices echoing through the book. Indeed, in a novel about exhumed bodies, the self-conscious exhumation of literary models is only appropriate and part of its postmodern texture. Just as McIlvaine's narrative understands itself as a collage of archival materials, assembled from eyewitnesses and cross-referenced newspaper files, so Doctorow's Waterworks is an ingenious mosaic of the narrative raw material of his predecessors, framed by his own artistic vision.

Readers of Doctorow will find much that is familiar and important here: McIlvaine's incessant concern with the slipperiness of language is at the heart of Doctorow's project as a language worker, beginning with Welcome to Hard Times. Similarly, McIlvaine's quest for meaning, especially as he attempts to adjudicate Sartorius's sanity, leads him into the quagmire of truth and justice, those Imponderables that define, in their elusiveness, the unmapped gray zones of the human mind, as they do in The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake. But Doctorow also breaks new ground. Under the guise of a historical reconstruction, Doctorow may have written his most political novel yet; it certainly is a retrospective vision into the present. The financial regimes of Boss Tweed and Martin's father, Augustus, suggest the machinations of today's corporate capitalism, as do the squelched labor unrests in favor of an eight-hour workday. More importantly, in the allegorical figure of Sartorius, Doctorow evokes the controversies surrounding contemporary medical technology, the need for egalitarian health care reform, and our cultural fear of mortality. The Waterworks reminds us that the increasing cultural authority of science is a matter of precarious balance: it can lead to genuine human welfare and, at the same time, if left unquestioned, legitimize the inhumanly human cruelties of Auschwitz. In more than one sense, the novel is a "panoramic negative print" of our post-modern condition.