They eventually meet up with Calvin Harper, the black 'assistant' to photographer Josiah Culp, whose photographs of battle scenes and their participants become historical records.Īs is always the case with Doctorow, real people mix with fictional characters, giving life to the narrative and a sense of immediacy to the action. An arm took only nine.' Two turncoats, the devious Arly and the naïve Will, serve as the primary comic relief, opportunistically trading their gray uniforms for blue, until it becomes more convenient to wear gray once again. Wrede Sartorius, a Union regimental surgeon, renowned 'for removing a leg in twelve seconds. Pearl, whom Mattie identifies as 'that horrible child,' is the mulatto child of her husband John Jameson and one of his slaves, and the orphaned Pearl, too, becomes a marcher, disguised as a drummer boy.Įmily Thompson, the elegant daughter of a Georgia Supreme Court Justice, joins the march after her father's death to help Dr. Mattie Jameson, the wife of a cruel slaveowner, has closed her eyes to the horrors of slavery, but when her estate is burned, her husband killed, and her 14- and 15-year-old sons conscripted to fight for the Confederacy, she has nowhere else to go but on the march. Through a series of dramatic vignettes, Doctorow reveals the family lives of many of these marchers, creating background and stimulating the reader's interest in the characters' futures. Doctorow, in his absorbing novel of this march, focuses on all the marchers-their varied interests, conflicts, fears, and goals-instead of focusing on battles and army maneuvers, creating a powerful and panoramic vision of how civilians, as well as soldiers, responded to the devastation of this terrible war. It is an immense organism, this army, with a small brain.'Īs the huge Union Army of General William Tecumseh Sherman burned its way from Atlanta to the Carolinas in 1864 - 1865, it was accompanied by a motley group of freed slaves, entrepreneurs, the dispossessed wives and children of landowners, and even a few turncoats, all of whom saw this army on the march as their protection from the hostile unknown. It sends out as antennae its men on horses. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels. 'Imagine a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day, a creature of a hundred thousand feet. ( Jump down to read a review of The Waterworks )

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The waterworks el doctorow book review