Adrift in Old New York
GOODMAN, WALTER
Adrift in Old New York The Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow Random House. 253 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Walter Goodman EL DOCTOROW'S new novel has elements of a detective story, a Gothic thriller...
...Like his literary predecessors, he makes a plausible case for cold-blooded science...
...No, not a literary type...
...the characters, with the possible exception of Donne, are dim, and he is not very complicated...
...He is also something of a public scold...
...But Doctorow's nostalgia for the "state of cheerful degeneracy" his narrator thrives on is streaked with bitterness at the city's cruelty and corruption...
...Even that sinister genius Sartorius (presumably a bow to Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carryle's indictment of English society) turns out to be windier and less interesting than advertised...
...He goes for assistance to Edmund Donne...
...All the qualities of men who prevail in our Republic...
...Together the two men follow a trail that leads to the sinister, incorruptible yet profoundly corrupted Dr...
...it has a prisoner in a sort of dungeon, and even a grave-opening-by-night scene...
...But what he accomplished was murderous in the very modern sense of the term...
...Donne is a captain, the only honest one of the Municipal Police, that "organization of licensed thieves...
...The story, written with a 19th-century inflection, has its heroes and heroines and villains: It has a dissolute painter and a fashionable minister and genteel ladies and low-life brutes...
...The Waterworks is short on all these ingredients...
...The reservoir is described in one of Doctorow's or McIlvaine's admonitory moments as "a baptismal font for the gigantic absolution we require as a people...
...The narrator chides his readers, "You look back on Boss Tweed with affection, as a wonderful fraud, a legendary scoundrel of old New York...
...This, we are told, used to be on 42nd Street, where the public library now stands, and where the city's orphan children played joylessly...
...Toward the end, Doctorow-Mcllvaine concedes to the reader that his villains have never fully appeared: "You have not seen them, except in the shadows, or heard them speak, except in the voices of others...
...The tale that drips out has to do with the exploitation of unwanted children by rich codgers clinging to their unworthy lives with the rapacity and ruthlessness they employed in making their fortunes...
...This time the personification of capitalism run amok is William Marcy Tweed, whose person barely appears in these pages, yet whose spirit presides...
...Occasionally you can imagine the author working by map: "Startmg from Prrnt-ing House Square, he went downtown along Broadway, over to Wall Street, and then east to the river, Fulton and South streets...
...We have here the abuse of innocence by power, the cold amorality and lucid insanity of science, and probably other fathomless evils...
...Sartorius (brilliant, like all cracked scientists...
...When young Martin disappears McIlvaine springs or dives into action...
...the traffic of Broadway with its drays and stages and two-in-hands all pressing forward under a net of telegraph wires with the sun lighting up the store-window awnings...
...The commercials also become a little wearying...
...Doctorow likes the inventory style and is good at it: "the squatters' shanties on the West Side...
...Keep your eye on the kids...
...Manifestly murderous...
...This time out, Doctorow, a skillful hand, is like a veteran captain who keeps his ship moving along more or less steadily despite dire thumpings in the hold...
...Take the following description of the members of the Tweed Ring: "They were nothing if not absurd??ridiculous, simpleminded, stupid, self-aggrandizing...
...We did not feel it so necessary to assume an objective tone in our reporting then," he explains, much like an editor of the 1990s...
...Martin reports having seen his late father??the notorious Augustus Pembrook, war profiteer, slave ship magnate and rogue through and through ??being borne along Broadway in a carriage with other spooky looking ancient gents in black coats and top hats, who seemed to be in mourning for themselves...
...The most vivid writing is reserved for New York's underside, as when the editor comes upon sketches by a city artist who specializes in "maimed and disfigured veterans painted in unflinching detail...
...Reviewed by Walter Goodman EL DOCTOROW'S new novel has elements of a detective story, a Gothic thriller fraught with symbols, a dark fantasy with overtones of science fiction, a romance, a plea for social justice, and a New York City gazetteer, circa 1870...
...Evidently aware that some readers may become restive, the narrator-editor-author writes as the climax approaches, "Not to try your patience, let me assure you that finally all the columns will be joined to be read across the page...
...He invites us into deeper waters, specifically the Croton Holding Reservoir...
...The narrator is McIlvaine, a lapsed Presbyterian, a man of conscience and sensibility, and city editor or assistant managing editor or both of the Evening Telegraph, until deposed over a matter of principle...
...Now, if the reader is expected to get into the spirit of such an adventure, to take it seriously on its own terms, the author is obliged to provide a fascinating character or two, plot surprises, dramatic confrontations and so forth...
...But the voyage is not much fun, and when the ship is finally unloaded the payoff is slight...
...The soul of the city," McIlvaine tells us early, "was always my subject...
...Doctorow is not one to settle for Gothic conventions, however...
...the vagrant children of the Five Points warming themselves over a steam grate...
...And murderous...
...The gazetteer works best...
...people scavenging the garbage scow at the dock off Beach Street...
...the mob at the Exchange...
...As he has shown in earlier novels like Ragtime, World's Fair and The Book of Daniel, Doctorow has an affection for old New York and a talent for evoking its noises, smells and general commotion: "...all at once block and tackle were raising the marble and granite mansions of Fifth Avenue, and burly cops were wading through the stopped traffic on Broadway, slapping horses on the rumps, disengaging carriage wheels, and cursing the heedless entanglement of horsecars, stages, drays, and two-in-hands, by which we transported ourselves through the business day...
...You may leave this novel, so freighted with portent, humming the scenery...
...Most of the story is delivered in a remote way, through the maunderings of the editor...
...It sounds like a novelist's admission of a creative failure...
...Here his journalistic juices are stirred by a young freelance book reviewer, Martin Pembrook (impecunious and brilliant, like all book reviewers...
...they've been hiding in my language...
Vol. 77 • June 1994 • No. 6
