[In the following review, Fender considers points raised in essays in Poets and Presidents and discusses the thematic and aesthetic aspects of The Waterworks in relation to Doctorow's previous fiction.]

"The development of civilizations", writes E. L. Doctorow in the earliest of the essays in Poets and Presidents, "is essentially a progression of metaphors." At this level of abstraction, the narratives of history and fiction are indistinguishable. On a more specific level, they diverge. The difference is that novelists are "born liars", who are to be trusted precisely because they admit to lying. Their documents are false, whereas the historians' can be verified. "History is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history … by which the available data for the composition are seen to be greater and more various in their sources than the historian supposes."

The trouble is that so many others seek to break into the novelist's domain. Advertising transforms factual products into fiction. Even the "weather reports are constructed on television with exact attention to conflict (high pressure areas clashing with lows), suspense (the climax of tomorrow's weather prediction coming after the commercial), and other basic elements of narrative". Does Doctorow feel threatened by these inroads? Not at all. "The novelist's opportunity to do his work today", he concludes, "is increased by the power of the regime to which he finds himself in opposition."

Not everyone approves of that oppositional stance. As another essay reminds us, Robert Alter has claimed that Catch-22 and Doctorow's own The Book of Daniel "were flawed by a spirit adversarial to the Republic". This comes as a bit of a shock: one of the brightest American critics attacking two of the best American novels written since the Second World War. Do even clever and learned Americans have trouble with political novels?

Doctorow thinks they do. "If a novel is about a labor union organizer, for example, or a family on welfare, it is assumed to be political, that is, impure, as for example a novel about life in a prep school is not." Political novels are all right if they're written by foreigners—by Nadine Gordimer or Milan Kundera or Günter Grass—but not if they come from Americans on the domestic scene. "This is analogous to President Reagan's support of workers' movements as long as they are in Poland."

This "aesthetic piety" Doctorow traces to the American tendency, even among working people, to refuse to assign people to a class, and instead to define themselves "not by their work but what they own from their work". So the American novel values the individual predicament, almost irrespective of the historical forces that condition it. Hemingway's Robert Jordan dies alone, loyal not to a cause but to his own code of honour. "The most international of American writers was, morally speaking, an isolationist. War is the means by which one's cultivated individualism can be raised to the heroic. And, therefore, never send to ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls so that I can be me."

Trenchant and illuminating as they are on topics ranging from Dreiser and Jack London to popular songs and the American Constitution, these essays provide a key to the author's own work in a way that no other criticism by a contemporary novelist does. For the project of Doctorow's fiction has been to deconstruct crucial episodes in American political history and to rebuild them out of the hidden, or suppressed, or forgotten "false documents" of his own speculative imagination. Welcome to Hard Times (1961) is an anti-western, morally demoting the romantic outlaw to an impersonal, destructive force. In order to explore that restless era before the First World War, when conventional social and political categories were being undermined—and reality itself rendered problematic by the movies and the new "science" of publicity—the plot of Ragtime (1974) brings the narratives of fiction and history together, involving imaginary characters with actual figures like Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit.

As its title makes clear, The Book of Daniel (1971) elevates this contrast between official and hidden history to the urgency of an apocalypse. Against the red scare following the Second World War, the institutionalization of the Cold War in the Truman Doctrine and the execution of the Rosenbergs, the novel juxtaposes an alternative politics known only to an elect group of adepts. Daniel's father tells him "things I could never find in my American History, about Andrew Carnegies's Coal and Iron Police, and Jay Gould's outrages … about using imported Chinese labor like cattle to build the West, and of breeding Negroes and working them to death in the South".

If Doctorow's false documents were just false, they would stand no chance against the official facts they confront. It is their documentary nature—or the appearance of it—that makes them authentic. Early novels like Don Quixote or Clarissa often disclaimed their fictions, pretending merely to be transmitting editions of letters or long-lost manuscripts. Their authors' tactic was "to use other voices than their own … and present themselves not as authors but as literary executors". Doctorow doesn't revert to these expedients, but in his more recent novels, he distances the narrative voice from his own, to suit it to theme and period. Ragtime is written in short, clipped, impersonal sentences. Not until the penultimate page of the novel does the narrative abandon the "documentary" mask of the third person. By contrast, the indulgent first-person narrative of Billy Bathgate moves in long, sinuous sentences often filling whole paragraphs.

The Waterworks takes the experiment a stage further. The new novel is voiced in a first-person which uses the balanced periods and formal address of Victorian prose, while reaching out, like Walt Whitman, to shake a later generation by its lapels:

You may think you are living in modern times, here and now, but that is the necessary illusion of every age. We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory to your time. There was nothing quaint or colourful about us, I assure you. New York after the war was more creative, more deadly, more of a genius society than it is now. Our rotary presses put fifteen, twenty thousand newspapers on the street for a penny or two. Enormous steam engines powered the mills and factories. Gas lamps lit the streets at night. We were three-quarters of a century into the Industrial Revolution.

What sort of book is The Waterworks? It is a Poe-like novel of detection, but a story in which the mystery, as befits Doctorow's project, involves civic, as well as familial and individual issues. Martin Pemberton, who works as a freelance for the journalist narrator, thinks that his rich father has died, leaving him penniless after an argument over the sources of the old man's wealth: slave trading and the supply of shoddy goods to the Union Army. Then one day, Martin sees an uncanny thing. "At the intersection of Broadway and Prince Street … was a white city stage…. The passengers consisted solely of old men in black coats and top hats. Their heads nodded in unison as the vehicle stopped and started again in the impacted traffic." One of those old men Martin recognizes as his father. Delusion? Actuality? Read it and find out. The answer is perfectly rational—frighteningly so. The inventive details of this improbable but believable chain of events are what make the novel worth reading.

It may be too pat to characterize The Waterworks as Doctorow's allegory of the Reagan era. But that is what it is—just as Catch-22, though set in the Second World War, is Heller's comment on McCarthyism. In both worlds (that's why Doctorow's narrator has insisted on the modernity of post-Civil War New York), technology has institutionalized the efficient production and distribution of every civic good save one: information, charity, law enforcement, power and light, are organized; only wealth remains undistributed. Rich old men can rob their families and corrupt the system to corner the most advanced medical care in the world, while their fellow citizens—a phrase they would never use except in a political speech—die of hunger and common-place diseases. And the more monolithic the civic system becomes, the better its networks and connections, the more easily it can be corrupted.

The Waterworks, like all good novels of detection, resolves its mystery through the patient investigations of freelancers and renegades: reporters and policemen out of favour with their bosses. And that's what Doctorow is too. Though hardly out of favour with his public and hardly languishing for want of sales and literary prizes, he remains something of a renegade in his pursuit of the American historical imagination.