SOURCE: "A Wonderful Town, Even Then," in Spectator, Vol. 272, No. 8655, May 28, 1994, p. 33.

In the following review, Whitworth informs the reader of the style and thematic concerns of The Waterworks.

The Waterworks is a marvellous book, gathering such momentum that I read the last 120 pages in one go at four o'clock in the morning. Doctorow has given us a novel of the prelapsarian state, a late 19th-century novel, something out of Conrad and James, out of Stevenson and Wells and Conan Doyle. Of course it's a bit of a cheek, taking this American for our own, for this is a book about New York in the years after Lincoln's assassination. And perhaps Doctorow would prefer to make his bow to Theodore Dreiser (on whom he has written two fine essays); he quotes F. O. Mathiessen—Dreiser was "virtually the first major American writer whose family name was not English...