I am a great E.L. Doctorow fan, and I love his ability to craft a tightly-woven historical narrative. I also love the way Doctorow can write in the first-person perspective, creating an empathy between reader and storyteller, as he did in "World's Fair" and "The Book of Daniel". In "The Waterworks," Doctorow creates a historical narravtive in the first person which tries to capture the essence of New York in the decade following the Civil War, and using a mystery as the hook to pull the reader in. As much as I am a fan of Doctorow's work, I have to say that here, he fails to pull it off.

The narrator of the book, a newspaper editor named McIlvaine, tracks the disappearence of a brilliant young writer named Pemberton. Pemberton disappeared after seeing a "ghost" of his thought-to-be deceased father, who left his widow and children penniliess, despite amassing a large fortune throughout his life. The ensuing pursuit of the truth (as Pemberton chases his father and McIlvaine chases Pemberton) through the streets of a very different New York City are dazzling in their detail and electricity, but the fault lies in the execution of the story: Doctorow simply does not effectively keep the reader interested in the story, and thus it can get quite confusing at times. My suspicion is that Mr. Doctorow did not just come up with the story and then try to write a novel about it. My theory is that this novel is actually an expansion of an essay he wrote a couple of years before. "The Waterworks" was written in 1994. In 1992, Doctorow wrote an essay called "The Nineteenth New York," which is included in a collection of his essays entitled: "Jack London, Hemmingway, and the Constitution" [Random House, 1993]. Both the essay and "The Waterworks" contain a description of New York which use the same quote from Whitman ("Somehow I have been stunned. Stand back!..."), and the same description of Newsboys "battling for their corners"; both describe Lincoln's funeral train travelling through the city in suspiciously similar ways.

In my opinion, Doctorow liked the idea of "going back" to old New York, and used this story to do it. Therefore, the novel has an atmosphere, a gritty realism that only Doctorow could create, but strangely falls short in narrative, something Doctorow--almost--never does

Doctorow is an excellent writer who adapts his style to his subject matter. Unfortunately, as other reviewers have noted, the stylistic quirk of ellipses gets annoying and more frequent as the novel progresses. Doctorow may have chosen this style of punctuation to imply that much in McIlvaine's New York was unspoken, implied, unfinished - but, even if that was the case, it doesn't serve to do much more than make the reader want to tear the words out of the narrator. Despite this flaw, I thoroughly enjoyed this Doctorow novel, which, while not his best, certainly compares favorably with his body of work.

I recommend THE WATERWORKS for serious readers of literary and historical fiction.

The Waterworks is more about ideas - a society's obligation to confront politcal corruption, ethical questions that arise as humankind's scientific knowledge advances, the ethical obligations of journalists - than the mystery of why a young man has disappeared and if he's dead or alive.

Doctorow captures the atmosphere of New York City of the 1870s. His characters, esp. the narrator McIlvaine and the Police Captain, are complicated and intriging.

The book's central character is a novelist gathering information for a book he is trying to write about a cross stolen from an Episcopal church that mysteriously reappears in a synagogue. We hear ruminations about the writer's love life, sketches of scenes, scenarios for movies, commentaries (or midrashes)on pop tunes, and much more.

We read harrowing accounts of life in a Jewish ghetto during World War II. (This is powerful, but read William Styron's "Sophie's Choice." It packs a much bigger emotional punch.) We also hear about World War I, Vietnam, and the movies.

We are even treated to monologues by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, and Frank Sinatra -- the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the postmodern world?

Like his novelist-central character, Doctorow jumps from topic to topic, without apparent rhyme or reason. It is of course perfectly fine to write a nonlinear, fragmented novel. Just look at Don DeLillo's astonishing "Underworld." But it is never clear what "City of God" gains from this approach, why it had to be done this way and only this way.

For this reader at least, it was so much postmodern fizz.

I've never read Doctorow before. The title attracted me, along with the "mystery," or was it a foretelling(?), of the cross found on the roof of an evolutionary Judaic synagogue.

Anyway, I finished it more satisfied than I thought I would. I like to learn from what I read--and I learned so much about life in a Jewish ghetto during WWII. I learned the horrors from a soldier's pov during the same war and the Vietnam war. Just snippets, mind you, but very salient ones indeed.

I love the last "sermon" at the end of the book--Hey God, quit taking it on the shoulder and show us the devil in all his revulsion with the evil people we all know of rotting on his body, and I think more people would behave better towards their fellow man. Evil needs more immediate consequences.

I found myself questioning my own sense of belief in organized religion, Jesus, etc. I liked having some of my queries validated. Ultimately, it all boils down to how we behave and how we treat each other. What if God was one of us?

Of course, most of the book is more elusive to grasp, but I reverberated to parts of it and feel good from the experience. I can't imagine reading any more of his works. I couldn't take the brutality as I imagine he would write it. So descriptive.

Would someone tell me what the bird references meant that were sprinkled throughout? Did they represent the diversity and similarities of religions or what?