SOURCE: "Necropolis News," in New Republic, Vol. 211, Nos. 3 & 4, July 18, 1994, pp. 44, 46-8.

In the following review, Delbanco presents an appreciation of the symbolic features of The Waterworks and comments briefly on the essay collection Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution.

Everybody's favorite stage set this year has been old New York. It first turned up in Martin Scorsese's movie of The Age of Innocence, which made viewers feel as if they were inside a meticulously accurate diorama of Edith Wharton's fashionable Manhattan in the 1870s. Then Caleb Carr enlarged the set for his murder mystery of the 1890s. The Alienist, to include the wharves and the dark alleys where Wharton's grandees would never venture. Now E. L. Doctorow has returned to the immediate post-Civil War period for his own New York tale.

If the setting of The Waterworks is similar, Doctorow's way of representing it is entirely different. This...