[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, insist, this is no ghost story. For although he uses all the classic devices of the genre—a body that refuses to stay dead, an incredulous storyteller sucked into the Perilous Pursuit of Truth, an omniscient, laconic and socially awkward policeman—his book is actually designed to be a heavyweight novel of ideas, an allegory of vitality, mortality and the manipulation of nature. It is as though, descending at La Guardia Airport, he saw the welcome mat of the cemeteries in Queens, extending all the way to the horizon of towers, and wanted to have the populations of the dead and the living mingle in one vast literary commotion.

Almost all of Mr. Doctorow's novels have been, to some degree, documents of New York history, and one of his greatest strengths has been the richness of his descriptions of its cultural landscape, from turn-of-the-century New Rochelle and Manhattan in Ragtime to the Jewish Bronx of his 1930's childhood in World's Fair. But in The Waterworks, New York is no longer a setting for the action: it is the action, the principal character, the presiding genius and the trap of history.

Ostensibly, Mr. Doctorow lands the reader in Boss Tweed's city in 1871, at the precise moment the Tweed Ring is about to fall apart. New York is a gravy-stained, spit-flecked, bituminous, rough-necked, livid place that we fall into in his pages, and if this sounds familiar, it should. For although the odors are coal-sulfur and horse manure rather than pretzel scorch and subterranean steam, Mr. Doctorow's postbellum Gehenna is plainly held up as a mirror in which we are meant to see our own time and manners. And more than is usually the case with Mr. Doctorow, this is not a pretty picture.

Of the Ring, McIlvaine editorializes, "They were nothing if not absurd—ridiculous, simple-minded, stupid, self-aggrandizing. And murderous. All the qualities of men who prevail in our Republic." This New York of then and now and ever is a place imprisoned in thuggish corruption, where the police conspire with, rather than against, crime; a lair of vampire capitalism, a warren of alleys crawling with the urchin "street rats" who subsist on the refuse of the city's wants and needs, darting beneath the wheels of indifferent carriages, vending the news, loitering at the edge of scummy saloons.

Mr. Doctorow has caught this vision of a gaslight necropolis, where distinctions between the living and the dead are blurred by the presence of so many species of dead-and-alive souls, with forensic precision. His New York is also a residence of the mutilated. In one stunning episode, the artist Harry Wheelwright, possibly the most memorable of the characters in the novel, is seen painting the torso of a Civil War veteran, horribly deformed by the wounds of battle. Appropriately, then, Mr. Doctorow also gives his narrator, McIlvaine, a mutilated diction, broken by elisions and compressions of thought and utterance. This positions him to value the aggregating skills of the police officer, Donne, since "enlightenment comes … in bits and pieces of humdrum reality, each adding its mosaic bit of glitter to the eventual vision."

The self-conscious choice of a broken style will not please those for whom the pleasure principle has always been a major reason to read Mr. Doctorow, whether dancing to the lilt of his deceptive jauntiness in Ragtime or enfolded in the lyric intensity of The Book of Daniel. But it is of a piece with his other courageous formal reinventions. Just as he was able to concoct a kind of peculiarly furtive flatness for the voice of the title character of Billy Bathgate, he has produced an extraordinarily fretful, glance-over-the-shoulder writing style for McIlvaine, the purveyor of easy commonplaces.

The understated edginess of the writing serves the intensity of the story very well, as if it were overheard or glimpsed rather than seen dead on. One of McIlvaine's freelance culture reviewers, Martin Pemberton, habitually dressed in an ancient Union Army greatcoat and roiling in righteous misanthropic rage against the vulgar iniquities of the Gilded Age, announces to the editor that he has glimpsed his father, whom the world believes dead and buried, riding in a white municipal omnibus together with a company of spectral old men.

Bierce, among other writers, specialized in what he called "the parenticide club." And it turns out to be filial loathing rather than piety that drives Martin to discover the truth behind the apparition. His father, Augustus, had accumulated a fortune from running African slaves to Cuba in the very midst of the Civil War while also selling shoddy goods to the Union Army. Having gone to great pains to disinherit himself, the better to lead a life of virtuous chagrin, Martin is haunted by the thought that his father might have cheated the grave much as he cheated the Union. Pursuing the truth, he disappears, and McIlvaine goes after him.

The book limps a little in the opening stages of the search. Perhaps it is just because Mr. Doctorow is so successful at sketching New York and its Hudson Valley landscapes that his characters often seem swallowed up in its scenery. The two women in Martin Pemberton's life, for example, Emily Tisdale, who has loved him long to no effect, and his young stepmother, Sarah Pemberton, are seen only through the intermittently lecherous survey of McIlvaine's jaundiced eye, though as usual Mr. Doctorow is phenomenally good at erotic summaries. The wanly intelligent Emily arouses McIlvaine by the thought of penetrating all that woolen-skirted virtue. Sarah, on the other hand, is a peculiar combination of the motherly and the voluptuous: "The recessiveness of spirit that made her so lovely, even gallant, would appeal to any man who wanted endless reception, endless soft reception of whatever outrage he could conceive."

It is a part of the devilish cunning of this most intellectually designed of all of Mr. Doctorow's books that characters who superficially resemble their prototypes in 19th-century fiction, notably the policeman and the God-usurping scientist, refuse to be confined within their allotted conventions. Even the names Mr. Doctorow has chosen are themselves a kind of artful literary and philosophical riddle. The full name of the detective, for example, is Edmund Donne, equipped to unravel a mystery that is less paranormal than metaphysical, where the articulations between body and spirit are the crux of the matter. More mischievous still, the extraordinary figure at the heart of the story, who delivers a set speech of such terrible cogency that the reader has to fight not to be implicated in its logic, is called Dr. Sartorius. But his message is, in fact, the exact opposite of that which Thomas Carlyle puts into the mouth of Professor Teufelsdrockh in "Sartor Resartus." For where the metaphysical Teufelsdrockh argues that the tailored garment of our bodies is but a fabric for our divine spark, Mr. Doctorow's stitcher and weaver of bodies, Sartorius, who has won fame by the merciful speed of his battlefield amputations, insists that we are nothing but our biological matter. Perhaps Mr. Doctorow falters a little in a predictable passage where Sartorius's experiments are catalogued in such a way as to horrify a 19th-century reader, but provoke our own amused recognition of a medicine of interchangeable parts and an industry of cosmetic immortality.

The Waterworks is, however, much more than the sum of its own ingenuity. For all its rootedness in the social reality of New York, the story is carried along by a poetic flow of myth. Literature itself dissolves into this bath of memory when we realize that the site of the present public library on 42d Street and Fifth Avenue was once the great Croton Holding Reservoir. McIlvaine is haunted by the memory of having witnessed a child drown in the reservoir, the boy's toy boat drifting helplessly against the Egyptian Revival walls of the tank. And Mr. Doctorow knows that it was in Egypt that the original mythic connections between sacrifice and immortality, blood and water were first launched into the stream of our culture.

None of this formidable erudition gets in the way of the force and pace of the novel. Even former editors—like Mr. Doctorow—occasionally need editing, though. The image of "a great caesura of air, a gorge of sky that implied the Hudson" is so brilliantly judged the first time it appears that when it shows up again as "the peculiar implication of a river in the lighter sky between the bank and the far bluffs," the reader is made aware of the valves and pistons of Mr. Doctorow's formidable literary engine working up and down like the hydraulic monster at the heart of his story. For the most part, though, the reader is helplessly and gratefully caught in the current. For the waters that lave the narrative, from the sooty rains of the metropolis to the single bead of fluid Mr. Doctorow suspends on the tip of a priest's nose, all run to the great confluence, where the deepest issues of life and death are borne along on the swift, sure vessel of his poetic imagination.