[In the following brief review, Hutchings outlines the elements of The Waterworks and considers its literary predecessors.]

Walking down Broadway in 1871, a young freelance journalist named Martin Pemberton notices a horse-drawn omnibus containing several old men dressed in black. Among them, he recognizes his dead and supposedly buried father—a businessman who was as notoriously corrupt as he was socially eminent; his fortune, based in part on slave-trading and war-profiteering, has been mysteriously unlocatable since his death. While pursuing his investigation into this strange event, Martin Pemberton disappears: perhaps kidnapped, perhaps murdered, but by whom and why?

From this scenario, E. L. Doctorow has constructed The Waterworks, an intriguing if implausible moral fable that is also a stylish whodunit and a masterfully detailed evocation of Boss Tweed's New York—and, implicitly, of specific literary precedents from nineteenth-century American literature. Doctorow's narrator, like the one in Melville's tale of "old" New York, "Bartleby the Scrivener," is a genial bachelor who defines himself through his work—though as an editor at one of the city's fifteen newspapers, he is more cynical and streetwise than Melville's bond lawyer. Doctorow's narrator McIlvane, like Melville's unnamed narrator, becomes increasingly involved in the life of his strange and ascetic employee—though it is his disconcerting absence from the office (in contrast to Bartleby's unremitting presence) that eventually dislodges the narrator from "the state of irresolution most of us live in with regard to our moral challenges." Eventually, at the city's reservoir (the waterworks of the title), he discovers secrets that are as dark and nefarious as those concealed at (and ultimately in) the murky tarn in Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher."

Notwithstanding such precursors from earlier American fiction, the foremost literary precedents for The Waterworks are the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle: McIlvane's investigation proceeds with Holmes-like logic and tenacity from a phenomenally startling initial incident (the supposedly dead man sighted among the living) and an ensuing ominous complication (the disappearance of the witness and estranged heir). Eventually he uncovers a bizarre and extravagant plot devised by the elusive archcriminal mastermind Dr. Sartorius, a Moriarty-like evil genius who profits inordinately from the hopes and fears of his elderly victims: extremely wealthy patients who trust his hubristic claim that human will and knowledge—specifically, his scientific expertise—can prevail even over mortality itself. McIlvane's position as a newspaperman affords him an intimate knowledge of the seamier aspects of life in his city, while the paper's "morgue" (clipping files) yields even more vital information than Holmes's library. The city-wide network of ever-observant newsboys constitutes a plausible American counterpart of the Baker Street Irregulars.

The world of New York in 1871 is often explicitly compared to and contrasted with a deliberately undefined "now" that is also referred to (wholly implausibly) as "your time" by Doctorow's elderly, retrospective narrator. Then-and-now analogies about such issues as medical technology and the prolongation of life, moral and political corruption, wealth and poverty, and neglected and exploited children can all easily be drawn, but the fundamental seriousness of such concerns is undercut repeatedly in The Waterworks by the Doylean conventions of the detective story cum entertainment.