SOURCE: "A 'Gothic Fantasia' from E. L. Doctorow," in Chicago Tribune Books, July 10, 1994, p. 3.

In the following review of The Waterworks, Shechner takes account of the novel's strengths and failings.

The germ of The Waterworks is a four-page vignette of the same title that appeared in E. L. Doctorow's Lives of the Poets (1984). In that sketch the body of a drowned child is plucked from a reservoir, presumably the Croton in New York's Central Park, and whisked away in a horse-drawn carriage, while the silent narrator looks on.

I am fond of Lives of the Poets, the least celebrated of Doctorow's books, because it pretends to be nothing more than it is, a book of etudes for the left hand. Doctorow's troubles begin where the ambition swells and etudes get inflated into historical novels—mournful fanfares given a social/historical spin. That was the problem with Ragtime; so...