Where Our Troubles Began : In the most old-fashioned of his historical novels, E. L. Doctorow paradoxically comments most directly on the darkness of our modern world. : THE WATERWORKS, <i> By E. L. Doctorow (Random House: $23; 253 pp.)</i>

The imaginative universe of E. L. Doctorow is as unbounded in time as it is spatially restricted by his love and hatred of New York. He travels through history by means of inference, from old buildings. His characters are like genies conjured up by the mental stroking of New York City landmarks--the Morgan Library in “Ragtime,” Bathgate Avenue in “Billy Bathgate,” the fairgrounds in “World’s Fair,” P.S. 70 in “The Book of Daniel.”

His new book, “The Waterworks,” seems to have been inspired by the reservoir and dam at Croton, just north of New York City. (I venture this guess in part because Croton appears in the book and in part because I’ve been there myself. I’ve looked out on the imposing dam, the impounded water and I’ve had the thought: There’s a novel here.)

Doctorow has found the novel not in any realistic history of the waterworks but in their mythic being, their symbolic pairing of nature’s immensity and civilization’s presumption. What makes Doctorow our most exciting historical novelist, aside from sheer talent and audacity, is his perception that history can only be reconstructed, never re-experienced. However anxious a character named Eisenhower may be on the eve of D-day, it’s hard for readers in 1994 to share in his suspense. Hindsight inevitably estranges us from historical figures, punctures the illusion of their free will, and so undermines the sense of identification on which realism depends. This is why Doctorow’s best novels (“Ragtime,” “Billy Bathgate”) aspire less to be imitations of life than to be sophisticated toys for grownups.

The setting of “The Waterworks” is New York City in 1871. The industrialized North has recently won the Civil War, and Boss Tweed and his ring are milking a metropolis financially engorged by victory. “Almost a million people called New York home, everyone securing his needs in a state of cheerful degeneracy. Nowhere else in the world was there such an acceleration of energies. A mansion would appear in a field. The next day it stood on a city street with horse and carriage riding by.”

The narrator of the novel, whose voice is heard here, is a newspaper editor named McIlvaine, a man whose poetic gifts do interesting battle with his rationalism. In lieu of children, the unmarried McIlvaine has a “clutch” of free-lance writers, and one afternoon his favorite of them, an angry young man named Martin Pemberton, comes into the newspaper office with a bloodied face and torn shirt and says: “He’s alive . . . my father, Augustus Pemberton. He is alive.”

McIlvaine the rationalist knows that Augustus Pemberton, a vilely wealthy wartime profiteer and former slave trader, has been dead and buried for half a year. He shrugs off the son’s words as “a poetic way of characterizing the wretched city that neither of us loved, but neither of us could leave.” Soon enough, however, Martin vanishes from New York. The story he leaves behind with friends contains the first of the series of powerful images that together form the novel’s mainspring.

In roaming lower Manhattan in a rainstorm, it seems, Martin has caught sight of a horse-drawn city omnibus occupied by six somber men in black coats and black top hats. “They are old men, or ill enough to look old, and eerily unmindful of the world.” One of them, from the egg-like wen on the back of his neck, Martin identifies positively as his father.

Lest there be any doubt about the young man’s sanity, we learn that the same thing has happened a second time, on 42nd Street during a snowstorm. Again a public conveyance, again the men in black. And again a glimpse of old Augustus, “who at the same moment turns an incurious gaze upon (Martin). A moment later the entire equipage is swallowed up by the storm.”

These twin sightings, with their Gothic atmospherics, set the novel’s machinery in motion. To reveal more of the story would spoil the book’s main pleasure, which consists of McIlvaine’s investigation of Martin’s disappearance, the alternate confounding and confirming of his rationalism. “The Waterworks” is a detective quest of exceptional single-mindedness.

Exceptional, and in some ways lamentable. Readers of this book will wait in vain for the irony and sensuality of “Ragtime,” the sumptuous prose and vivid characters of “Billy Bathgate,” the viscerality of “The Book of Daniel.” Despite the occasional anachronism (my Webster’s has him using intelligentsia 35 years too early), the novel is notable for sounding genuinely old-fashioned. The author achieves a woodenness of character reminiscent of William Dean Howells, and the narration tends, like much of Wilkie Collins, to be both laborious and overheated.

The pages are weighted with unnecessary recapitulations and heavy-handed underlings of abstract themes. There are several thousand sets of portentous ellipses, in passages like this: “I had staked out my claim to a story, in effect negotiating with the police for my rights in it . . . but, after all, how phantom it was . . . no more than a hope for words on a page . . . insubstantial words . . . phantom names. . . .” Everywhere, you get the sense of an author who has despaired of showing and begun to tell.

And yet, and yet--what a kicker of an insanely dark secret Doctorow has planted at the center of his machine! Despite the novel’s Gothic rhetoric and rhythms and allegorical transparency, the ultimate shock to McIlvaine’s ordering of the world comes not from any supernatural horror but from the vastness and modernity of the urban conspiracy that he unearths. Doctorow is pointing less to Transylvania than to Auschwitz when McIlvaine, near the novel’s climax, speaks of feeling “not fear or dread . . . but a desolate bleakness.” A few pages later he speaks again of being “haunted . . . not by ghosts, but by Science.”

Apparently any universe both finite and unbounded, even an imaginative one, exhibits paradoxes of curvature. Following the history of modern New York back to its earliest limits, to a time when Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge are works in progress, we find ourselves emerging into a world more late-20th-Century than any Doctorow has written about before. Evil old Augustus Pemberton, with his “loyalty not to any one business, but to the art of buying and selling them,” could be Donald Trump or T. Boone Pickens. The twistedness of every father-son relationship in the book, the depiction of industry’s orphaning of an entire generation, amounts to a refreshingly hard-core Marxist comment on the contemporary breakdown of the family. And the novel as a whole bears with uncanny directness on, of all things, our country’s health-care crisis in 1994.

The longueurs and fascinations of “The Waterworks” are those of a toy whose colorful casings have been removed. We’re given the austere spectacle of shiny gears and naked symbols; also the tedium of a toy that leaves little to the imagination; and finally the mystery that a thing so frankly contrived can still affect us. Uningratiating but visionary, the book invites us to peer back to the verge of modern industrial society--and shows us ourselves peering forward.

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