The Waterworks

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The Waterworks: A Novel (eBook) Pub. Date: 11/17/2010 Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
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The Waterworks (Reprint) Pub. Date: 5/8/2007 Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

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The Waterworks Pub. Date: 5/31/1994 Publisher: Random House Large Print

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The Waterworks Pub. Date: 5/1/1997 Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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The Waterworks Pub. Date: 5/31/1994 Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

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The Waterworks Pub. Date: 5/31/1994 Publisher: Random House Value Publishing, Incorporated

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The Waterworks Pub. Date: 6/21/1994 Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
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The Waterworks (Cassette - 4 Cassettes) Pub. Date: 5/31/1994 Publisher: Random House Audio Publishing Group

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Overview

“An elegant page-turner of nineteenth-century detective fiction.”
–The Washington Post Book World

One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton a freelance writer, sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of The New York Times, “a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past.”

“Startling and spellbinding . . . The waters that lave the narrative all run to the great confluence, where the deepest issues of life and death are borne along on the swift, sure vessel of [Doctorow’s] poetic imagination.”
–The New York Times Book Review

“Hypnotic . . . a dazzling romp, an extraordinary read, given strength and grace by the telling, by the poetic voice and controlled cynical lyricism of its streetwise and world-weary narrator.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer

“A gem of a novel, intimate as chamber music . . . a thriller guaranteed to leave readers with residual chills and shudders.”
–Boston Sunday Herald

“Enthralling . . . a story of debauchery and redemption that is spellbinding from first page to last.”
–Chicago Sun-Times

“An immense, extraordinary achievement.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

The author of Billy Bathgate employs his famous storytelling gifts in a highly original and mysterious tale set in post-Civil War New York. It's 1871, and maimed veterans beg in the streets, newsboys fight for their corners, and a class of new wealth and weak intellect is all aglitter in a setting of mass misery.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Each novel by Doctorow is an entirely different experience, a journey of the imagination into hitherto uncharted territory. The Waterworks , set in the corrupt but hideously exciting New York of the decade following the Civil War, is the strangest such journey yet. The narrator, an elderly newspaperman named McIlvaine, recalls the bizarre events surrounding the disappearance of one of his paper's best freelance writers in 1871. Martin Pemberton was the son of Augustus Pemberton, a brutal, cunning man who had made a fortune as a war profiteer, then died, leaving his family mysteriously penniless. Martin was convinced he had seen his father alive, in a coach in the company of other old men; then Martin vanished. McIlvaine interests the municipal police, in the person of odd, incorruptible Captain Edmund Donne, and together they ferret out a weird scheme in which aging millionaires have paid the brilliant, cold-blooded Dr. Sartorius to preserve their lives in a state of suspended animation. The tale has the brightly lit intensity and surreality of a dream, heightened by McIlvaine's halting, amazed narration; and such is the power of Doctorow's imagination that the very city itself, its burgeoning modernity, its huge machines, its febrile citizenry, seems to become a major actor in the drama. World's Fair and Billy Bathgate were both given a human dimension by their child's-eye point of view. Here Doctorow is taking a larger risk by placing the reader at a much greater distance from the events and subduing his contemporary sensibility in favor of a wonderfully convincing 19th-century angle of vision. It is as if Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James had somehow combined their incompatible geniuses to bring this profoundly haunting fable to life. (June)

Library Journal

In the kind of historical fantasia we have come to expect from Doctorow, a young man in 1870s New York spots his supposedly deceased father on a horse-drawn omnibus and follows him into the depths of the city.

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews

School Library Journal

YA-Newspaper editor McIlvaine investigates the disappearance of freelance journalist Martin Pemberton and uncovers a macabre scientific experiment that involves Pemberton's supposedly dead father and several other wealthy old men. The narrative's digressions contain the heart of the novel: Doctorow's presentation of New York in 1871 as impacted by the Industrial Revolution and the corruption of Boss Tweed's government. Although the book is not overly long, its complexity of diction will deter all but the most erudite YAs. Those who persevere will gain insights into journalism, post-Civil War society, and political corruption while considering the implications of medical experimentation, then and now.-Arlene Bathgate, Chantilly High School, VA

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

"Haunting...mysteriously sinister. A gothic tale with the same concern about amoral science that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to write 'Frankenstein'." -- New York Times

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780812978193
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 5/8/2007
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 309,001
Product dimensions: 5.17 (w) x 7.97 (h) x 0.58 (d)

Meet the Author

E. L. Doctorow

Few writers have succeeded as E. L. Doctorow has at creating stories (largely based in 1930s New York) that evoke both warm, personal memory and a grander national portrait. Doctorow doesn't always promise historical veracity, but he captures our imagination of the past flawlessly.

Biography

E. L. Doctorow, one of America's preeminent authors, has received the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation For Fiction, and the William Dean Howells medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published a volume of selected essays Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution, and a play, Drinks Before Dinner, which was produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival. He resides in New Rochelle, New York.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).

Good To Know

Doctorow began his career as a reader for Columbia Pictures. He went on to work as an editor for New American Library in the early 1960s, and then served as chief editor at Dial Press from 1964 to 1969.

Critics assailed Doctorow for delivering a commencement address critical of President George W. Bush at Hofstra University in May 2004.

1. Also Known As:
  
  Edgar Lawrence Doctorow (full name; named for Edgar Allan Poe)
  Edgar Laurence Doctorow
2. Hometown:
  
  Sag Harbor, New York, and New York, New York
1. Date of Birth:
  
  January 6, 1931
2. Place of Birth:
  
  New York, New York
1. Education:
  
  A.B., Kenyon College, 1952; postgraduate study, Columbia University, 1952-53
2. Website:
  
  http://www.randomhouse.com/atrandom/doctorow/

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