The Waterworks, by E.L. Doctorow

...What makes Carr's effort so interesting, beneath its serial killer plot and its lavish antiquarian descriptions, are its conundrums about free will and determinism, refracted in a dozen different imaginary ways but true to the mental spirit of its time...

...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...

...Through Mcllvaine, he describes that city in a quirkily interesting voice, a voice that seems to have a great deal to say...

...and his historical novels have opened what Alfred Kazin once called "the great trunk of forgotten time in New York in which" (Kazin added) "I, too, I thought, would someday find the source of my unrest...

...Without question, Doctorow's earlier novels, especially Ragtime, have contributed to the trend...

...And like the failed poet Penfield in Doctorow's novel Loon Lake, McIlvaine is also fond of cribbing from . . . E.L...

...Mcllvaine remembers "the city's bard," Walt Whitman, whom he regards as "something of a fool in what he chose to sing about...

...But these passages are brief, and before long we are back to the parable, back to the collapsing of the past into the present, back to the musings of McIlvaine— who in his dotage seems all too often a thoroughly modern man...

...Later on, we are back at the waterworks, where it turns out that an amoralist, Dr...

...Now and then, there is a taste of how these matters played themselves out in 1871, as when Doctorow offers up an Episcopal sermon about the blasphemies of natural science and of the emerging study of Biblical philology...

...Mcllvaine (he never has cause to tell his given name) lives alone in an apartment on Gramercy Square...

...And the parable ends benignly, almost bathetically: Nature, helped along by some human detective work, defeats Sartorius's schemes...

...And then there is New York's unwashed citizenry...

...and amid lightning flashes, newsboys' cries, and the clattering of horse hooves, we race with the agitated young man up past Grace Church and Dead Man's Curve, and catch a frightening glimpse of Pemberton pere's hunched shoulders and "the wizened Augustan neck with its familiar wen...

...New York, The Alienist—a book that is, in some obvious respects, inferior to The Waterworks...

...and of course McIlvaine...

...the clash of science and revealed religion (and, in some quarters, their mutual accommodation...

...the charming savages of the Tweed Ring, beset by scandals, cover everything up, hoping that they, too, might get a dose of Sartorius's elixir...

...And this is what Doctorow seems to want his readers to think...

...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...

...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...Adding to his difficulty, he has tried to do so in an FALL • 1994 • 563 American metropolis that for at least a century and a half has been dedicated to the continual obliteration of its history—a city about which, as early as 1845, the aristocratic ex-mayor Philip Hone (whom Mcllvaine must have encountered as a young reporter) wrote in his diary: "Overturn, overturn, overturn...

...His story is of a Manhattan that he thinks is nearly forgotten only thirty years after the fact, a Manhattan before telephones let alone telephone books, where the cops on patrol carry neither guns nor billy clubs, where Central Park is still a novelty—and where promenaders take in the sights (and in summertime the breezes) atop the Croton Distributing Reservoir at 42nd and Fifth, ignorant of the terrible transactions unfolding inside the walls beneath their feet...

...Still, in The Waterworks more than ever before, Doctorow assumes some of the historian's burden, which is to dramatize the moral, or political, or religious, or aesthetic, or philosophical problems of the past, but on the past's terms as well as on our own...

...Those conundrums have connections with how we think today, because they concern unresolved (one might even say timeless) questions about human frailty, certainty, and aspiration...

...and even the lunatics are predictable end-of-theworlders, as flat as the sandwich boards that are slung across their shoulders...

...I believe you're something of a historian...

...Doctorow has already successfully fended off complaints about his tampering, and has made a good case for a heightened, mythic kind of accuracy that is true to his sense of the spirit of a time...

...Or McIlvaine on his "hard" realist city, "going through the same kinds of affairs it goes through today," "a city of souls whose excitements have always been reportable, who have always been given to that nervous, vocal, exhausted but inexhaustible combat that defines a New Yorker, even if he has just yesterday walked off the boat...

...passages from the short story in Lives of the Poets that was the germ of this novel (nicely rendered here as a dream chapter...

...Doctorow gestures to these things too...

...more to the point, he is uneasy because he thinks that his story rightfully belongs to his ex-protégé, Pemberton...

...a new order of organized political plunder...

...Unless I am mistaken, Mcllvaine lifts some details from the writings of the wonderful, once-celebrated Manhattan chronicler of the 1840s and early 1850s, George G. Foster...

...Through some turn in the zeitgeist, Doctorow has delivered The Waterworks at a moment when several novelists and other storytellers have taken up history, and when American historians, weary of academic conventions, are trying to reinvent historical narrative...

...is the maxim of New York...

...Doctorow is up to his old tricks, evoking the atmosphere of another era but with eerie homologies to the present, creating Manhattan impressions that are at once historical and timeless...

...the Tweed Ring falls...

...Sartorius, one investigator remarks, "was a man ahead of his time...

...Take, for example, Caleb Carr's current bestseller about Old A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...

...There is an obligatory Doctorow lowlife character, the hoodlum Knucks Geary, who is one of Donne's informers...

...In his artfully designed film The Age of Innocence, Martin Scorsese cannot avoid draining off much of Edith Wharton's wicked social commentary...

...Donne, Martin Pemberton, and Mcllvaine retreat into domesticated lives and for the most part (we imagine) they live happily ever after, in the most boring sense of that term...

...And is the New York that he recalls really so different from our own...

...Sartorius's name recalls the horror film character of thirty-odd years ago, Dr...

...The politicians, personified by Tweed, are de562 • DISSENT scribed with the exactness of a Thomas Nast cartoon...

...There is plenty of Poe in Mcllvaine's story, but there is also plenty of Vincent Price...

...Doctorow conjures it up with a knowing dexterity, but then gives us crowd scenes straight out of a "sunshine-andshadows" tourist book or a sentimental Victorian charity report: street rats, mutilated veterans, hopeless strikers, ragpickers on garbage scows, a legless Negro on a wheeled board—the victimized, begging, mostly mute masses...

...Doctorow: an occasional image, like puffs rippling on water...

...In many respects, it is the most conventionally plotted of Doctorow's New York books—a combination science fiction allegory and detective novel straight out of Edgar Allan Poe...

...I think that I once knew this Martin Pemberton, or someone a lot like him, and he is very much alive...

...it might also refer to Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus...

...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...

...But with its vaunting of the describers over the described, its overreliance on playing tricks with time, and its scary but, finally, unsurprising parable, that voice does not say as much as I had hoped it would, either about the present or about the past...

...So long as Doctorow weaves his allusions across the decades, he sustains a mesmerizing cleverness...

...But if Knucks is rendered with historical precision, he comes across as a generic New York tough guy...

...Both Martin Pemberton and Mcllvaine come to see something admirable in the man...

...Sartorius, a monomaniac, feeds them the blood and glandular matter of the poor...

...The Waterworks certainly offers pleasures that surpass the rest of this season's run of the stories about Old New York and other American historical locales...

...A lifelong bachelor and lapsed Scotch Presbyterian, he is regarded by his neighbors (or so he thinks) as a decent if sometimes disagreeable codger...

...Sardonicus...

...You're not telling me we're that much further along, are you...

...The shrewd and singularly unmetaphysical policeman who helps Mcllvaine track down the Pembertons and Sartorius is named Edmund Donne...

...and, Doctorow suggests, the city will regenerate its terrible energies and fixations, in ways that will match and even surpass the wildest dreams of the 1870s...

...his best friend, the painter Harry Wheelock...

...The very bones of our ancestors are not permitted to lie quiet a quarter of a century and one generation of men seem studious to remove all relics of those who precede them...

...All the qualities of men who prevail in our Republic...

...The same holds true for the novel's underlying conceits about history...

...Which is to say, he was a man of our time...

...whereas succeeding in it can elevate the work of less accomplished writers...

...Thus McIlvaine's musings on Tweed and his minions: "They were nothing if not absurd—ridiculous, simpleminded, stupid, self-aggrandizing...

...Above all, he struggles, as all journalists and historians do, to lift a coherent narrative out of a random chronology—in this case, apparently, the one dark adventure in his life as a repressed city-desk reporter and editor...

...Sartorius, has been secretly keeping the old men alive by sucking vital fluids from the bodies of captive street kids, to the shuddering accompaniment of a giant orchestrion, a sort of primitive musical synthesizer...

...Despite its shimmering verisimilitude, however, the novel has a diminishing, abstract quality...

...As I've said, the narrator Mcllvaine is getting on in years, and he recites his memoir elliptically, with a self-awareness that is sometimes pained...

...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...He admits that his memory may slip now and then—although most of the factual slips are fairly minor, the sort of thing that only a historian would notice and only a pedant would find objectionable...

...You remember the doctors' riots . . . when the mob chased those Columbia medical students and wanted to lynch them for dissecting cadavers in their anatomy classes...

...Literary riddles, homages, and inside jokes abound...

...But Can allows the connections to build by precisely framing his characters' dilemmas in their own intellectual idiom, the idiom of the 1890s...

...Sartorius, by contrast, is an idea, The Genius Who Goes Too Far...

...More subtly, he describes details and characters that could only have existed back then but that also emanate a weird familiarity—not least the central character in Mcllvaine's story, the disinherited young freelancer Martin Pemberton, an ex-Columbia College student partial to wearing army surplus, who got his start as a writer with an undergraduate exposé of his wealthy father Augustus Pemberton's callous wartime profiteering...

...And also on municipal corruption, big-city newspapers (and toadying big-city newspaper tycoons), science, technology, the homeless, and the evils of private health care run amok...

...Doctorow easily avoids these sorts of traps...

...It is not that one turns to the story (or to any of Doctorow's fiction) looking for an accurate portrayal of the past—accurate, that is, in the narrow sense that a historian might mean, describing only what happened or could have happened at a particular time...

...whole chunks from a Doctorow non-fiction essay about Old New York...

...yet Doctorow has McIlvaine quote some confessional Whitman lines near the start of the book, and then he has him imitate "A Song for Occupations" on the book's final page...

...The story has some arresting, graphic moments...

...Again, the imagined past mirrors the present...

...Doctorow's most deeply imagined characters are not the parable's main protagonists, but rather those who explore and describe it...

...One gloomy afternoon on crowded Broadway (Mcllvaine recounts this secondhand), Martin Pemberton spies an omnibus that he has seen before, carrying a cargo of sickly aged men, including one who looks like his deceased father...

...The old men who employ him are the living dead, their previous existence reduced to documents and clippings turned up by the investigators...

...But New York also lives on...

...And murderous...

...That was a hundred years ago...

...Beneath these diversions is a parable of unbridled capitalism, one (we are led to suppose) that might have as easily been set in the 1980s or 1990s as in the 1870s: the wealthy sacrifice their family legacies and pay millions to Sartorius in order to keep themselves alive...

...But then some character has to go and talk about history explicitly, as in a scene in which one of the medical investigators challenges some baleful comments by McIlvaine about Sartorius's brilliance...

...and when Mcllvaine drinks whiskey with Donne at Pfaff's, Whitman's old hangout, he is put off by the callowness of the saloon's "raucous good humor...

...and more...

...Failing in the historian's burden can turn even the best novelist into a historical tourist...

...Yet Doctorow also takes some large risks in The Waterworks, by dealing for the first time with a New York long before his own or his parents' , and by experimenting once again with the techniques of historical fable...

...There are effective descriptions of a Hudson Valley estate, of a scene inside an artist's studio, and of the view from the parapet of the waterworks, with the city falling back before something that wasn't a city, a squared expanse of black water that was in fact the FALL • 1994 • 561 geometrical absence of a city...

...The Waterworks offers readers all of the elements for this kind of operation: shocking problems of urban poverty...

...Just as Balzac created a post-Revolutionary Paris that was not-quite-Paris, so Doctorow creates a not-quite-New York...

...Most of the action transpires in 1871, but the book is actually a reminiscence, spoken (not written) by an elderly ex-newspaperman just after the turn of the century—about the same time as Ragtime...

...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...

...As for us narrative historians, professorial self-consciousness about bucking academic expectations (analogous to but more distracting than McIlvaine's verbal tics) always threatens to get in the way of our stories and their meaning...

...Observing and reflecting on it all, Doctorow's reporters have a habit of lapsing into grand clichés, sometimes with an unmistakable mid-to-late-twentieth-century ring...

...Moreover, by returning repeatedly to the city, and having now extended his reach to cover an entire century, Doctorow has become the most ambitious and intriguing modern literary fabulist that New York has yet inspired...

...Yet The Waterworks does not ponder the trunk's contents deeply enough...

...He knows that some people will think that his story is crazy, which is enough to make any storyteller nervous...

...10017 (212) 595-3084...

...After the boy's-eye views of World's Fair and Billy Bathgate, Doctorow is back to a more accessible story, told by an adult narrator...

...and these connections illuminate the present...

...He creates an imaginary city of death on the cusp of modernity —gaslit and driven by 564 • DISSENT reckless, obsessive ambition, a city where all that is holy is profaned...

...How that last question thumps...

...Can mars his entertaining thriller with clunky historical references, like the patter of a Gray Lines guide...

...Apart from Captain Donne, these characters are drawn from the city's critics, journalists, and artists: the young Martin Pemberton...

...Ambiguities surround Sartorius, the supreme methodical intellect, who is just as capable of providing enormous public goods as he is of ghoulishly serving the high and mighty...

...But is Mcllvaine really speaking that long ago...

...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...

...and Doctorow populates his sidewalks with some colorful religious lunatics...

...His boyhood novels have advanced a line of New York writing that stretches back to Melville's Pierre...

...Aficionados of Old New York like to poke their friends and gesture to the pressed-tin ceilings and the patches of cobblestone that have cheated the wrecking balls and the jackhammers...