NOVEL: The Waterworks (1994)

Robert Frost penned a few lines collectively called "Dust of Snow," which run, "The way a crow / Shook down on me / The dust of snow / From a hemlock tree // Has given my heart / A change of mood / And saved some part / Of a day I had rued." I don't know how often the poem is quoted without irony (a quick web search finds one reader extolling it as a nature haiku, while elsewhere it adorns the pages of a holiday website alongside "The True Meaning of Christmas"), but surely it only makes sense when read as a parody of the English Romantics and of their lability of mood under the sway of natural phenomena. In the same way, E.L. Doctorow's The Waterworks (1994) takes on the lineaments of a historical thriller, and critical reviews tend to praise it for its evocation of 1870s New York. But I'd like to argue that the novel quite fails as a period piece, which is all right because I suspect it is not meant to be one; while as a sort of philosophical poem, or game of thought, or artwork of the interior of the mind, it is utterly radiant.

Let us start from the outer layer and peel our way in, questioning first the style, then the story, and lastly the soul of the work. In terms of style, The Waterworks is exquisitely written. A sample sentence, concluding a paragraph of urban description, runs: "The cookstoves in our homes burned coal, and on a winter morning without wind, black plumes rose from the chimneys in orderly rows, like the shimmering citizens of a necropolis." That last word gives the conclusion its punch. We are reminded that an expansive authorial vocabulary is key to a good literary experience, that a modern writer ought never aim for verisimilitude in his narrator's voice if he wants to cast over us a spell of gravitas. Word choices like clerestory, cyprian, sward, bespeak authority and conform to literature's calling to be in a way larger than life. And then check out this sentence from chapter three: "[Oliver Wendell] Holmes was railing at certain ignorant New York critics who were not sufficiently in awe of his fellow trinomials of New England literary genius, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow..." and so forth. The wit is contained in that fortuitous rare word.

As for the story, I am surprised that The Waterworks has not yet been made into a movie. It is a mystery-thriller, resolved in a scene of such indelible visual power and mythological implication that I am loath to say anything about the plot lest it unfold for you with any less impact. Let's just say that Doctorow touches on the Tweed Ring, the Industrial Revolution, the corruption of the Gilded Age, homeless children, and crime, with windows into politics, law, medicine, science, journalism, and society in post-Civil-War New York City. But why is it not a convincing period piece? Because, firstly, there are several anachronisms of tone, moments when we no longer believe we are hearing from an elderly newspaper editor about his recollections of the 1870s, ranging from chapter nine's scene of oral sex to his later calling himself a "son of a bitch" and using the word "fun" in a modern idiom. More undermining are the anachronisms of description: 1870s New York is constantly evoked from a late 20th-century perspective. He mentions stagecoaches and carriages as though they were zebras, rather than describing them the way we would describe an everyday sight such as a car. That is, the physical manifestations of the historical time period are represented iconically rather than realistically. "Standing on any corner," the narrator rhapsodizes, regarding industrialization, "I could swear I heard the telegraphy singing through the wires." It makes sense that a newspaperman would be alive to the pulse of his times, but the self-consciousness is excessive and precious. It would be as if people a hundred years from now were to imagine us writing odes to our first computer chip.

A certain flatness to the characters seals the case: this book is not about taking us to the nineteenth century. The only option that remains is that this book is about thinking about the nineteenth century. Indeed, the peculiar thing is that even though the outward story concerns corpses and violence and disappearances, the narration is leisurely, even redundant, and always inwardly musing; the hallmark of The Waterworks' syntax is the ellipsis. The form of this novel may be a thriller, but its soul, characterized by insistent reflections and caesuras, is none other than that of a poem. You can think of those ellipses as evocative of line divisions: what else can you make of the following excerpt? "And we had readers of the city accustomed to this...who scanned our columns the instant they got them, hot from the hands of the newsboy...as if our stories were projections of the multiple souls of a man...and no meaning was possible from any one column without the sense of all of them in...simultaneous descent...our life of brazen terrors spending itself across seven word-packed columns of simultaneous descent...offered from children's hands for a penny or two." There: in interpreting Doctorow's mesmerizingly cerebral novel as poetry, we can understand how it succeeds so well despite its historical imperfections. Its central problem (posed by the solution to the mystery), while also a problem of morality (meriting comparison to a certain contemporary debate, perhaps), stands on its own imagistically like a myth. We become intoxicated in the embrace of these lines of words, and walk away from the last page strangely quieted, even chastened.