starers.’ There are lots of things wrong with that sentence, notably the fact that. but not by that sustaining idea of a future that only comes humming in the secret aliveness that everyone can see except the two idiotic. ‘For if you think about it, we live mostly by habit. “IT IS fairly common to finish a novel feeling that it hasn’t quite come off, much rarer to feel that in one respect it could have been improved by a simple mechanical operation at the editorial stage. Take the following review from Michael Dibdin in The Independent when the book came out here in 1994: Astonishing as it may seem to those who love the book (myself included), Waterworks has always received a more mixed reception than the majority of EL Doctorow’s work. I’d love to be able to point the finger, call out the publishers, and cry incompetence - but I have an unfortunate suspicion that this lack of availability is as much to do with neglect on the part of we readers than any failure by The Man. Already, the rhythm is beguiling, especially that final sentence, with its several clauses building so steadily to the punch in the guts of “the persistence of evil in general.” Already, it’s clear, that this is the writing of a master.Īnd yet, if you’re in the UK, and you have an urge to get hold of a nice new copy of this wonderful novel, you’re likely to be disappointed. Better still, that father, and that lingering sense of evil. The difficult, romantic, incisive and clearly disturbed Martin Pemberton. And don’t you just want to read on? Already we have two intriguing characters deftly sketched in just a handful of words. That’s the first paragraph of EL Doctorow’s Waterworks. 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.” 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. “People didn’t take what Martin Pemberton said as literal truth, he was much too melodramatic or too tormented to speak plainly.

Books by el doctorow