The Waterworks (1994): “Even longtime readers, though, are likely to find The Waterworks Doctorow‘s strangest and most problematic invention so far. Part of the allure springs from the subject, which plays upon the mysterious fascination that outlaws and gangsters have always held for law-abiding American citizens.” The account begins with a bed wetting in the middle of the Depression and ends on the eve of World War II with a nine-year-old Edgar Altschuler burying a cardboard time capsule containing a Tom Mix decoder badge, his school report on the life of F.D.R., a harmonica and a pair of Tootsy Toy lead rocket ships, ‘to show I had foreseen the future.'”īilly Bathgate (1989): “ is mixing elements from his other novels in a manner that proves combustible and incandescent.

But the book reads like a memoir, and is unmistakably based on the author’s early boyhood in the Bronx. World’s Fair (1985): “Doctorow calls it a novel. Reading the book finally seems like overhearing bits of an oddly familiar tune.” Such dislocations are undeniably frustrating at first, but they gradually acquire hypnotic force. Chronology is so scrambled that the aftereffects of certain key events are described before the events occur. Narration switches suddenly from first to third person, or vice versa, and it is not always clear just who is telling what. Swatches of poetry are jumbled together with passages of computerese and snippets of mysteriously disembodied conversation.

Loon Lake (1980): “The written surface of Loon Lake is ruffled and choppy.

The waterworks doctorow