One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin
Pemberton, a freelance writer, sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly
men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While
trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his
employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s
fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with
primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own
profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and
squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of the
New York Times, “a dark moral tale…an
eloquently troubling evocation of our past.”
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