SOURCE: "The Novelist as Liar," in Times Literary Supplement, May 27, 1994, p. 20.

In the following review, Fender considers points raised in essays in Poets and Presidents and discusses the thematic and aesthetic aspects of The Waterworks in relation to Doctorow's previous fiction.

"The development of civilizations", writes E. L. Doctorow in the earliest of the essays in Poets and Presidents, "is essentially a progression of metaphors." At this level of abstraction, the narratives of history and fiction are indistinguishable. On a more specific level, they diverge. The difference is that novelists are "born liars", who are to be trusted precisely because they admit to lying. Their documents are false, whereas the historians' can be verified. "History is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history … by which the available data for the composition are seen to be...