The Waterworks. A mystery set in 1871 New York City with a possible supernatural element told from the perspective of a newspaperman. Told in the style of Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, it's a creepy mystery for sure. Sign me up! Trying to read more Kenyon College authors. It's where I went and is known for it's literary output. E.L. Doctorow is probably the most famous alum, so figured I'd start there. Mostly just read a bunch of Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Waterson also went there) and a contemporary professor that is an asshole.
Hell of an opening paragraph got me pretty interested:
“People didn’t take what Martin Pemberton said as literal truth, he was much too melodramatic or too tormented to speak plainly. Women were attracted to him for this - they imagined him as some sort of poet, though he was if anything a critic, a critic of his life and times. So when he went around muttering that his father was still alive, those of us who heard him, and remembered his father, felt he was speaking of the persistence of evil in general.”
The gist is the narrator, McIlvaine, who works as a newspaper editor, seeks his missing freelance reporter Martin Pemberton who has vanished after telling him he has seen his recently deceased father alive, wandering the streets of New York. McIlvaine and Detective Donne, one of the few good cops in an age of corruption, uncover a mystery involving the deaths of several wealthy New York men, the elder Pemberton among them. All of this leads to trouble, as you might expect.
Three things I really loved about the book. First, his narrator is a newspaper editor named McIlvaine. I'm crazy about detective novels where it's a regular Joe who gets pulled into the action. This is especially true if the guy is a newspaperman like I used to be. With this being back in the 19th century, we get a lot of how the industry worked back then, which is cool and interesting, to me at least. Second, get a nice portrait of the New York City of old. Like other Doctorow novels, this is a document of the city. The novel's greatest strength is these vivid, rich description of the cultural landscape of the Boss Tweed-controlled city that is on the verge of falling apart.
Lastly, I was pretty interested by the villain of the novel. Something of a Moriarty type, Dr. Sartorius is a great character that is whispered about throughout much of the novel. Once we finally see him near the end, he lives up to the hype as a Mengele-like physician that plays god while disregarding morality and convention. Unlike Mengele, however, he might be onto something with his work.
Only thing I wasn't crazy about was Doctorow's writing style. Dude loves ellipses as there are about 1,000 of them, no shit. Guess it gives the impression of thought or oral storytelling. Also, the narrator is old and tells of some crazy shit. Sort of signifies his difficulty in telling the tale. I found that aspect a little gimmicky.
