THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407220491
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
THE WATERWORKS
E.L. DOCTOROW
Random House. 253 pp. $23.
SOMETHING EVIL IS afoot on the ancient streets of E.L. Doctorow's New York City.
Earlier Doctorow novels offered tours of the pavement and psyche of New York in different shades of light and time. His latest, The Waterworks, rambles deeper and darker than those excursions. Less gauzy than some of his earlier novels - Loon Lake, for example - and more tightly bound in its structure, Doctorow's new book is a chilly little tale of terror, laced together with a Poe-like genius for story and Doctorow's own gift for silky, intoxicating language.
New York in 1871, through the writer's eye, is a megalopolis of corrupted government and spirit, where the wealthy suck the marrow - literally, in this case - from the dispossessed, and the few honest souls are just beginning to break the hold of the all-grasping Boss Tweed.
``As a people,'' Doctorow's narrator tells us, ``we practiced excess. Excess in everything - gaudy displays, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Ragpicking was a profession. A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery.''
Emerging from these lurid streets is one Martin Pemberton, a quirky and intense free-lance newspaper writer. Young Pemberton is haunted by the recurring appearance, through rain and driven snow, of a horse-drawn municipal omnibus carrying a clutch of old men dressed in black. Among them he sees his despised father, a vulgarian who made his fortune in the slave trade and the sale of shoddy goods to the Union army in the Civil War.
Trouble is, his father is dead and buried. Supposedly.
Pemberton abruptly disappears in his pursuit of the ghost coach. His editor, McIlvaine, pulls together one honest cop and Martin's few close friends in an effort to find him.
What they uncover is a macabre, hidden world where the dead can dance if they were wealthy enough in life; where urchins stolen from the streets are held in an illicit orphanage until they are needed by Sartorius, a demented genius of a doctor whose pursuit of the secrets of life will not be stalled by the petty, temporal concerns of the moralists.
The imagery of dread is strong, evoking a mental replay of grainy black-and-white 1930s horror films: a shocking exhumation, lashed horses flailing through the streets with wheeled coaches in trail, mystery characters who lurk on the edge of the story, their menace strongly felt but never quite in full view.
Throughout, there is an edgy pulse of heavy machinery in constant motion underground, the ceaseless pumping of The Waterworks.
Stripped to its basics, and in the hands of lesser talent, this would be a good B-grade Gothic horror, worthy of one of those red tinfoil paperbacks with spooky eyes peering through a cutout in the cover. Doctorow, though, brews the tea slowly, carefully, and lets it steep until just the right moment.
Narrated by the editor McIlvaine, the story drifts and turns in its early stages, moving easily as McIlvaine is merely puzzled by the disappearance of his free-lancer. It builds pace as puzzlement turns to dread, then panic. The tone, though, seldom strays from that of a friend telling a lengthy, forbidden secret over cognac, late at night.
Close followers of Doctorow might recall hints of The Waterworks from a short story by the same name that appeared in his 1984 collection, ``Lives of the Poets.'' The brief original, of a foundering toy boat on a choppy reservoir leading to the discovery of a boy drowned in the works below, is expanded to a poignant dream sequence late in the novel. Some passages reappear nearly verbatim, but with little touch-ups that show Doctorow forever tinkering and toying with language and mood.
The Waterworks strengthens Doctorow's status among the ablest of contemporary American fiction writers. This might be faint praise among bookshelves swamped with tinny lawyer-of-the-week dramas and bodice-rippers. But those books are easily handed off without a thought, or left forgotten in motel lounges. Doctorow's will remain on the shelf. MEMO: Dave Addis is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
LISA GARCIA
E.L. Doctorow crafts a compelling vision of urban terror in ``The
Waterworks.''
by CNB