 First edition | |
| Author | E. L. Doctorow |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical fiction |
| Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | 1994 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
The Waterworks (1994) is a book by American writer E. L. Doctorow. It was his eighth published novel.
The novel is a first-person account written by the character McIlvaine some thirty or forty years after the events portrayed in the novel.
The setting of the novel is New York City in 1871. McIlvaine, a newspaper editor, begins with his account of Martin Pemberton, a freelance journalist who works under him. Martin’s father, Augustus Pemberton, is recently deceased. Augustus had disinherited Martin several years earlier after Martin expressed disapproval of the unscrupulous business methods by which Augustus had accumulated a large fortune. After his father's death, Martin sees his father, briefly and accidentally, in a horse-drawn "omnibus" belonging to the municipal transportation company as it drives past him in a crowded street. The passengers, including his father, are all elderly well-dressed men.
Martin tells four people of the sighting: his editor, McIlvaine; his fiancée, Emily Tisdale; the family pastor, Dr. Grimshaw; and a college friend, Harry Wheelwright. When Martin mysteriously disappears soon afterward, McIlvaine begins looking for him by first talking to all four. He also talks to Augustus's widow (and Martin's stepmother), Sarah Pemberton, who has always liked Martin and is deeply concerned about him. From Wheelwright, McIlvaine learns that he and Martin secretly opened Augustus's grave and found a child buried there instead of the old man.
From Sarah, McIlvaine learns that Augustus was diagnosed with a terminal blood disease and that with the assistance of his secretary, Eustace Simmons, he entered a private hospital said to be near Saranac Lake in upstate New York and run by a Dr. Sartorius. There, she was told, Augustus died. Sarah also reveals that Augustus's wealth seems to have vanished shortly before his death, leaving Sarah and her young son, Martin's half-brother Noah, penniless.
McIlvaine approaches an old acquaintance, police captain Edmund Donne, for help. Donne, McIlvaine soon finds out, has a personal interest in the case - he had courted Augustus's widow Sarah many years earlier, before her marriage to Augustus. Their investigation finds no trace of the hospital in which Augustus supposedly died. Instead, it takes them to The Home for Little Wanderers, a well-funded private orphanage run by Eustace Simmons. They discover Martin locked in the basement, catatonic and almost dead of starvation.
When Martin is at last well enough to talk, he reveals what he discovered after being kidnapped and imprisoned by Simmons to stop him from asking questions about Augustus. Augustus Pemberton had faked his death. Along with other wealthy old men of the city, each of whom was terminally ill, Augustus is being kept alive by Dr. Sartorius. Sartorius, a brilliant and innovative Army surgeon during the Civil War, has invented treatments that were then unknown to medicine: blood transfusions, dialysis, bone marrow transplants and others. His dark secret is that young children must be sacrificed for their blood and somatic cells. Dr. Sartorius considers himself innocent of their actual deaths, as each child "died from fright" and not from his nefarious medical attention.
With the assistance of the corrupt Tweed Ring, which runs New York (and with which several of the old men are connected), Sartorius has built a secret sanitarium in which he is free to experiment and administer his treatments without any supervision.
When Donne discovers the location of the sanitarium in a municipal waterworks installation outside the city, he stages a police raid. The Tweed Ring is in the process of being destroyed by a corruption investigation and is no longer able to protect Sartorius and his establishment. Sartorius is arrested; his patients are found dead except for Augustus, who is missing.
Sartorius is brought to the insane asylum on Blackwell's Island, where he claims to be continuing his research. Augustus, who was removed from the sanitarium by Simmons before the raid, is found dead at his old home. Simmons is also found dead, killed in an accident while trying to flee with part of Augustus's fortune. The money is turned over to Sarah, as Augustus's widow. Sarah and Donne are soon married. Martin, now recovered, marries his fiancée, Emily. McIlvaine resumes his career as an editor, but never publishes the story of his investigation.
The first-person narrator presents a very negative image of the city he lives in – and he shows the readers an authentic view on the New York in 1871. He describes the corruption by William Tweed (whose picture we know from Thomas Nast's cartoons, published in Harper's Weekly ) and he describes the child poverty, the calamities of the newsboys and a lot of buildings and streets how they looked at this time. He cites Walt Whitman for showing that his New York is another one.
The novel was less successful than Doctorow' previous works Billy Bathgate (1989) and Ragtime (1975), but like them it combines history with fiction. Some of its characters appear in other works by the author, such as the appearance of Dr Sartorius in The March (2005). Doctorow's father loved Edgar Allan Poe and named his first son after him, and Doctorow told a journalist that Waterworks was written in Poe's honour. [1] In 1984 Doctorow had previously written a story about the Croton Aqueduct titled "Waterworks" which is featured in the collection Lives of the Poets. It is the story of McIlvaine, who watched the child drowning in the reservoir.
The descriptions of child poverty are evocative of the novels by Charles Dickens. Dickens himself visited New York in the early 1840s and wrote the book American Notes . Another possible source is George G. Foster's New York by Gas-light and Other Urban Sketches (1850).
Ragtime is a 1981 American drama film directed by Miloš Forman, based on the 1975 historical novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. The film is set in and around turn-of-the-century New York City, New Rochelle, and Atlantic City, and includes fictionalized references to actual people and events of the time. The film stars James Cagney, Mary Steenburgen, Howard Rollins, Brad Dourif, James Olson and Elizabeth McGovern. This features the final film appearances of Cagney and Pat O'Brien, and features early appearances in small parts by Jeff Daniels, Fran Drescher, Samuel L. Jackson, Ethan Phillips and John Ratzenberger.
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow was an American novelist, editor, and professor, best known for his works of historical fiction.
Laughing Gas is a comic novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 25 September 1936 by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States on 19 November 1936 by Doubleday, Doran, New York. Written in first person narrative, the story is set in Hollywood in the early 1930s and is, compared to, say, Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), a light-hearted and exclusively humorous look at the film industry and in particular at child stars. Both Schulberg and Wodehouse describe the methods of all those would-be screenwriters and actors hunting for jobs, but Wodehouse's depiction is not at all serious or critical.
Ring for Jeeves is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 22 April 1953 by Herbert Jenkins, London and in the United States on 15 April 1954 by Simon & Schuster, New York, under the title The Return of Jeeves.
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A Few Quick Ones is a collection of ten short stories by P. G. Wodehouse. It was first published in the United States on 13 April 1959 by Simon & Schuster, New York, and in the United Kingdom on 26 June 1959 by Herbert Jenkins, London. The first US edition dust jacket was designed by Paul Bacon. The book's title comes from the informal phrase "a quick one", which is British slang for an alcoholic drink consumed quickly.
The March: A Novel is a 2005 historical fiction novel by E. L. Doctorow. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2006) and the National Book Critics Circle Award/Fiction (2005).
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The Coming of Bill is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse. It was published as Their Mutual Child in the United States on 5 August 1919 by Boni & Liveright, New York, and as The Coming of Bill in the United Kingdom on 1 July 1920 by Herbert Jenkins Ltd, London. The story first appeared in Munsey's Magazine (US) in May 1914 under the title The White Hope.
Indiscretions of Archie is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 14 February 1921 by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States on 15 July 1921 by George H. Doran, New York.
"Extricating Young Gussie" is a short story by the British comic writer P. G. Wodehouse. It was first published in the United States in the 18 September 1915 issue of The Saturday Evening Post and in the United Kingdom in the January 1916 edition of The Strand Magazine. It was included in the collection The Man with Two Left Feet (1917).
The Small Bachelor is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 28 April 1927 by Methuen & Co., London, and in the United States on 17 June 1927 by George H. Doran, New York.
The Luck of the Bodkins is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 11 October 1935 by Herbert Jenkins, and in the United States on 3 January 1936 by Little, Brown and Company. The two editions are significantly different, though the plot remains the same. The novel was serialised in The Passing Show magazine (UK) from 21 September to 23 November 1935, and this version was published as the UK edition. For its US magazine appearance, in the Red Book between August 1935 and January 1936, Wodehouse re-wrote the story, reducing its length, and this became the US book edition.
Quick Service is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 4 October 1940 by Herbert Jenkins, London and in the United States on 27 December 1940 by Doubleday, Doran, New York.
Barmy in Wonderland is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 21 April 1952 by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States on 8 May 1952 by Doubleday & Company, New York, under the title Angel Cake. The novel may be considered part of the expanded Drones Club canon, since the main character Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps is a member of the club.
Something Fishy is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 18 January 1957 by Herbert Jenkins, London and in the United States on 28 January 1957 by Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, under the title The Butler Did It.
Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin is a comic novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 12 October 1972 by Barrie & Jenkins, and in the United States on 6 August 1973 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. under the title The Plot That Thickened. Although written towards the end of the Wodehouse's life, and published 37 years after The Luck of the Bodkins (1935), the events of book follow on directly from those recounted in the earlier novel.
Spring Fever is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published on 20 May 1948, in the United Kingdom by Herbert Jenkins, London, and on the same date in the United States by Doubleday and Co, New York. Although not featuring any of Wodehouse's regular characters, the cast contains a typical Wodehousian selection of English aristocrats, Stoker family relations, wealthy Americans, household staff and imposters.
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