on. This chase is fascinating, although wildly implausible, but McIlvaine makes the worst of a good thing by insisting that what he reports has implications far beyond its particulars: "I would not have extended myself now, at my advanced age, if this were just the odd newspaper tale I had for you ... of aberrant family behavior. I ask you to believe - I will prove - that my freelance, finally, was only a reporter bringing the news, like the messenger in Elizabethan dramas ..." His story, the narrator says several times, is "far more than" the mystery of the Pemberton family. This claim is asserted but never convincingly shown. The shocking, Poe-like tale at the center of the novel does not achieve the emblematic significance that Doctorow wishes it to have. It is simply too bizarre to stand for - or comment on - anything outside itself, particularly the entire City of New York and what McIlvaine calls its "roiling soul, twisting and turning over on itself, forming and re-forming ..." The Waterworks is at its best when Doctorow stops McIlvaine's huffing and puffing about social significance and lets him get on with the business of telling an entertaining and sometimes truly haunting story....
