A Sense of the Past

The Waterworks is E.L. Doctorow’s latest meditation on history, memory, genius, and the City of New York. And also on municipal corruption, big-city newspapers (and toadying big-city newspaper tycoons), science, technology, the homeless, and the evils of private health care run amok.

In many respects, it is the most conventionally plotted of Doctorow’s New York books—a combination science fiction allegory and detective novel straight out of Edgar Allan Poe. After t...