Martin, freelance reporter, had an immoral, slave-trading, rich father Augustus Pemberton who died in 1869. Martin was disowned by him and hence was poor. In 1871 he tells people that his father's still alive. Martin had a fiancee, Emily, and an artist friend Harry. He disappears. The first-person persona, McIlvaine, is an editor of the Telegraph. He's looking back at these events. He's a bachelor. He investigated Martin's disappearance. He talked to Emily, to Sarah (Augustus Pemberton's 2nd wife, Martin's step mother, who wasn't left money by Augustus. She had a 9 y.o. son Noah), to Charles Grimshaw, an 1850s abolitionist pastor and friend of the Pemberton family and to Edmund Donne, an honest cop. When they talk to Harry he says that he and Martin dug up Augustus' grave and found a child's body inside. Donne becomes friendly with Sarah. After investigations he decides that Augustus and Martin are both alive.
One of Martin's sightings of his father, in a passing coach, was by a reservoir where a library now is. They look for Eustace Simmons, Augustus' factotum. A man (Dr Sartorius, Augustus' last doctor?) is buying 5-10 years olds off the street. Donne raids a new orphanage. They find Martin in the cellar, and the coach he saw. Simmons escapes. When Martin recovers he said that he had tracked down Simmons, asking about his father. He was forced into a carriage and taken to a sanitarium run by Dr Sartorius, a genius. His father's there. Sartorius invites Martin to stay.
Donne organises a raid on the Reservoir buildings (he'd guessed that the sanitarium was there, secretly funded). They find nurses dancing and 5 dead old men. They find Sartorius and take him to an Asylum. Donne and McIlvaine rush to Augustus' mansion. He's dead. Simmons is dead, having slipped while tried to escape with Augustus' money. Sartorius is killed by an inmate. Martin marries Emily. Donne marries Sarah.
I like the writing style. E.g. Early on, New York had many fires.
| Naturally it was the old city that tended to go up, the old saloons, the hovels, the stables, beer gardens, and halls of oratory. The old life, the past. So it was a pungent air we breathed - we rose in the morning and threw open the shutters, inhaled our draft of the sulfurous stuff, and our blood was roused to churning ambition. Almost a million people called New York home, everyone securing his needs in a state of cheering degeneracy. Nowhere else in the world was there such an acceleration of energies. A mansion would appear in a field. The next day it stood on a city street with horse and carriage riding by. |
There are sections where he uses ellipses. E.g.
| I had staked out my claim to a story, in effect negotiating with the police for my rights in it ... but after all, how phantom it was ... no more than a hope for words on a page ... insubstantial words ... phantom names ... its truth and actuality no more than degrees of phantomness in the mind of another phantom |
And there are flash-forwards - "I should also say, in abhorrence of suspense, that I think now, if I wasn't the only person to visit Sartorius, I was certainly the last before his murder at the hands of a colleague in criminal insanity a few days later".
Other reviews
- Sam Jorison (Waterworks has always received a more mixed reception than the majority of EL Doctorow’s work)
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