You may think it stands to your New York City today as some panoramic negative print, inverted in its lights and shadows…its seasons turned around…a companion city of the other side. The city he has erected in The Waterworks is in most regards the Manhattan of 1871, the oyster of the Tweed Ring, still fat from war profits but possibly hollow within, lurching its way into the modern era.
In Ragtime and World’s Fair and Billy Bathgate, for example, the city is carnival and mountain range and obstacle course by turns, brilliantly colored and dangerous and exhilarating.
Doctorow has made a subspecialty of constructing New York Cities, varied by historical setting as well as by architecture of genre and psychological weather. a story of debauchery and redemption that is spellbinding from first page to last." Chicago Sun-Times "An immense, extraordinary achievement." San Francisco Chronicle From the Trade Paperback edition.In the course of his career E.L. a thriller guaranteed to leave readers with residual chills and shudders." Boston Sunday Herald "Enthralling. 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. 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 poetic imagination." The New York Times Book Review "Hypnotic. an eloquently troubling evocation of our past." "Startling and spellbinding. Doctorow's skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words ofThe New York Times, "a dark moral tale. 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. 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. "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.
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