City of God: A Novel

E.L. Doctorow's "City of God" is about -- well, everything. There's the obvious Augustinian reference in the title. There are treatises on the Big Bang and the effects of popular culture. There's a moving lament for the end of democratic media and art and the rise of corporate Hollywood. There's a Holocaust diary. There's a study of the turmoil evoked by the Vietnam War. There's even a mystery of a stolen cross (although E.L. Doctorow never reveals the solution). Throughout Doctorow intertwines his thoughts on fate and the nature of God and religion.

With so many disparate elements, "City of God" shouldn't hold together; yet, somehow it does. I guess it's a testament to Doctorow's genius that he accomplishes what should be the impossible and creates out of a patchwork of ideas a riveting novel.

It's true this book is perhaps a little more all over the place than it needs to be -- did we really need those bizarre commentaries on popular songs? -- but I can't understand why so many people are calling it boring, or impossibly difficult. While it's true there's a whole lot going on here, and you often have only a vague sense of the connection between all the parts, I think that's a good thing rather than a bad thing. There's a whole lot going on, but it's all enjoyable and not terribly abstruse. And the mild sense of confusion one feels in trying to piece together the connection between the multitude of themes -- theorizing and retheorizing about exactly how all the parts are supposed to fit together -- isn't so much frustrating as it is intriguing.

The thing that struck me most about this work was the fact that I found myself immediately taken in by almost all of the many narrative strands, and was happy each time one of them resurfaced. (The exceptions being the commentaries on songs, and possibly the passages narrated by Wittgenstein which struck me as being written by someone who had a less than tight grasp on the man's philosophy.) All of the characters were sympathetically and richly drawn -- quite a feat considering how infrequently we meet with most of them -- and all of the ruminations were beautifully written which makes up for the fact that very few of them had anything truly original to say. I'm not sure how original Doctorow thought his ponderings on physics and metaphysics were supposed to be -- I'm guessing he knew their level of sophistication and originality very well. The originality, I think, was meant to come in where it's suposed to come from in a novel -- from the stories of particular lives. And these stories -- both on the individual level, and as a conglomerate -- succeeded in injecting the book with real originality and even brilliance.

E.L. Doctorow does a clever thing. He has a character who is the author writing this book. One organizing idea of the book is New York City. Another is ecumenical interest in God. The author uses time shifting and place shifting. This is an example of the use of the new historicism. Doctorow always has written with a sense of history.

The city's grid was laid out in the 1840's. Ben and Ruth had two sons, Ronald and Everett. Ben was a naval officer, a naval communications observer in World War I. Ronald served in World War II. He had to parachute from his plane and was discovered by a French peasant. Ruth lived to age ninety five, exceeding the lifetime of her husband by some thirty seven years. She always said she would not give her opinion unless asked to do so.

Sarah Blumenthal and Joshua Gruen are rabbis at the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. The synagogue is the site of the placement of a cross stolen from Saint Timothy's, an Anglican Church in the East Village. Thomas Pemberton, or Pem, meets Sarah and Josh when the locus of the cross is determined. Pem, in the course of the book, undergoes the closing of Saint Timothy's and his own self-designated reassignment to a hospice, the finding of a holocaust archive from Vilnius pertaining to the experience of Sarah's father following the death of Josh from a beating in Lithuania, the start of his studies to convert to Judaism, and his marriage to Sarah.

The author has occasion to interact with his own characters Pem and Sarah at the synagogue. Prior to Pem's beginning the conversion studies and prior to his marriage to Sarah, the author had commenced to study Pem in order to write an account of his experiences in his search for God. The book is multi-layered, intelligent, delightful.

Some initial caveats: 'City of God' is not a straightforward mystery as its blurb suggests. Nor is it the impossibly cerebral challenge that some have suggested. It is not a theological manifesto. Nor does its blend of fact and fiction does not entail Doctorow's habitual ironic play with history.

This is a book about connections. Life and art, fact and fiction, and the past and present conjoin in the ruminations of a middle-aged writer attempting to make holistic sense from the seemingly disparate threads of the late twentieth century. The novel is therefore also about the potential difficulties of being middle-aged, and of trying to look to the future when one is increasingly compelled to reminisce (and confess) about the past. Its characters roam the city of New York and then the world for missing objects and people, including stolen brass crosses from churches, WWII diaries containing evidence of Nazi criminals, and excommunicated reverends. Predictably (but also pleasurably), more important than what they find is what they learn about both themselves and the age in which they live.

Some reviewers have criticised the novel for its fragmentary style. But here Doctorow produces some of his most lyrical, least mannered excursions into the human unconscious yet. The novel's chief difficulty for readers is not in trying to understand it but in knowing how to read it. My experience of its chief pleasures come not from looking at the fragments individually, but by examning the connections between them.

Moreover, don't expect the 'city' of the title to be teeming with carefully delineated characters. Perhaps it's best to think of the novel as the examination of one person (Everett, the writer who collects ideas for stories, poems and songs in this 'workbook') whose presence is replicated in a number of different stories which range across twentieth-century history. That said, this presence is most successfully telescoped into Everett's contemporary evocations of Tom Pemberton, a cleverly drawn character and a bewitching symbol of oft-thwarted yet surviving ambitions.

This novel is a joyful celebration of age, memory, regeneration and hope for the future.

Final note: this isn't a 'postmodern' novel, although its style is experimental. In my opinion the subject is more traditional: like Victor Hugo or Dostoyevsky, it is concerned with the power of art to transfigure and redeem history. Be patient with this novel, and enjoy the rewards.

I have just completed the first reading of Edgar Laurence Doctorow's latest novel, "City of God". It is not an easy read. It is disjointed. Some of the characters require imaginative guesswork. BUT it is well worth the effort. Anyone who has lived the majority of his or her life in the 20th century will find a "shock of recognition" on many pages. The conflict of science and religion, the newer studies in cosmology and the horrors we have been witness to, all pose questions that defy answers. Some of us may still find solace in our faiths. As a retired physician I found myself frequently facing a dark, starry sky with my fist upraised asking: "WHY?" How could God, an infinite, all-knowing, loving, immortal being allow so much hatred, so much misery, some of which occurred with the concurrence of organized religion to take place? The pat answers learned from my faith were not sustaining and have left a void. The author addressed many of these conundrums and stimulates the reader to begin or, in my own case, to continue to puzzle over these age old problems. He touches on the next centuries ecological catastrophies, which if dealt with with past solutions will surely lead to our extinction. His evolutionary concept of an evolving infinite being is intriguing. The novel is thought provoking, uncomfortable but thoroughly engaging. I will re-read it and would highly recommend it to all thoughtful yet perplexed readers.