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...