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SOURCE: A review of The Waterworks, in World Literature Today, Vol. 69, No. 1, Winter, 1995, pp. 138-39.
In the following brief review, Hutchings outlines the elements of The Waterworks and considers its literary predecessors.
Walking down Broadway in 1871, a young freelance journalist named Martin Pemberton notices a horse-drawn omnibus containing several old men dressed in black. Among them, he recognizes his dead and supposedly buried father—a businessman who was as notoriously corrupt as he was socially eminent; his fortune, based in part on slave-trading and war-profiteering, has been mysteriously unlocatable since his death. While pursuing his investigation into this strange event, Martin Pemberton disappears: perhaps kidnapped, perhaps murdered, but by whom and why?
From this scenario, E. L. Doctorow has constructed The Waterworks, an intriguing if implausible moral fable that is also a stylish whodunit and a masterfully detailed evocation of Boss Tweed's New York—and, implicitly, of specific...
This section contains 540 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) |
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