The Waterworks
In the corrupt New York of the Tweed Ring, McIlvaine, an aging city editor at the Telegram, is haunted by a story he cannot print. His freelance writer Martin Pemberton, a disinherited Union veteran, insists he has seen his supposedly dead father on a white omnibus. When Pemberton disappears, McIlvaine and an honest police captain start to pull on a thread that leads to a secret laboratory hidden beneath the city waterworks. E.L. Doctorow writes in dark, Jamesian prose that turns Gilded Age Manhattan into a Gothic dreamscape of money, medicine, and unspeakable ambition. It is one of his most tightly wound novels and a strange, brooding companion to Ragtime.
What you might want to know about The Waterworks
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A newspaper editor in 1871 New York investigates the disappearance of a freelancer who claimed to have seen his dead father alive on a Broadway omnibus.
Yes. Coates has named The Waterworks among the Doctorow novels he most admires and cited Doctorow generally as one of the American writers he has learned the most from as a stylist.
Loosely. It shares themes with Ragtime and Billy Bathgate but stands on its own as a Gothic mystery, and it can be read cold.
The Waterworks was written by E.L. Doctorow, published in 1994 by Random House Trade Paperbacks.
The Waterworks is 272 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Waterworks takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
The Waterworks is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
