<![CDATA[City of God]]>

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You want ambition? E.L. Doctorow's City of God starts off not merely with a bang but with the big bang itself, that "great expansive flowering, a silent flash into being in a second or two of the entire outrushing universe." It doesn't, to be sure, remain on this cosmic plane throughout. There's a mystery here, along with a romance, a chilling Holocaust narrative, and a deep-focus portrait of fin-de-siècle Manhattan--not to mention cameo appearances by that Holy Trinity of contemporary mythmaking: Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Frank Sinatra. But while the author of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate is no slacker when it comes to entertainment, he has more in mind this time around. Even the title, with its Augustinian overtones, tips us off to the author's preoccupation with belief, human consciousness, and "our wrecked romance with God." Let's return, however, to that mystery. In the early pages of the novel, an enormous brass cross is pilfered from a church on the Lower East Side. Father Thomas Pemberton of St. Timothy's promptly sets off in search of it, dubbing himself the Divinity Detective. Yet he suspects from the start that this is no ordinary theft, with no ordinary solution: <blockquote> So now these people, whoever they are, have lifted our cross. It bothered me at first. But now I'm beginning to see it differently. That whoever stole the cross had to do it. And wouldn't that be blessed? Christ going where He is needed? </blockquote> Where He seems to be needed is the opposite side of the ecumenical aisle. The cross turns up on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism, a tiny Manhattan institution to which Pemberton has clearly been led by fate. His encounter with the synagogue's rabbinical duo--a husband-and-wife team struggling to reclaim a pre-scriptural state of "unmediated awe"--transforms his life. It also destroys what's left of his conventional Christian belief. Augustine's spin on original sin, for example, now strikes him as "a nifty little act of deconstruction--passing it on to the children, like HIV." And as his relationship with Judaism deepens, he discards the clerical collar altogether and embarks upon a penitential exploration of the Holocaust--which in turn allows Doctorow to loop his narrative back and forth between several generations of (mostly) Jew and Gentile. Astonishingly enough, the foregoing only scratches the surface of City of God. This marvelous hybrid also includes a metafictional framework (i.e., an author-as-character with a rather Doctorovian resume), an ongoing rumination on city life, and a dozen other major strands and minor players. There are, not surprisingly, a number of misfires. For example, Doctorow has long been interested in the power of American popular song--in the way that, say, Gershwin's work has come to function as a kind of secular hymnal. Yet the author's postmodernist variations on the standards, which appear at regular intervals throughout the novel under the ominous rubric of "The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards," are jaw-droppingly awful. One might also argue that the book is too centrifugal, too devoted to the storytelling principle of the big bang. Still, there is an undeniable power to the way Doctorow makes his fictional worlds collide, setting off all manner of historical and philosophical conflagrations. At one point he imagines "the totality of intimate human narrations / composing a hymn to enlightenment / if that were possible." A tall order, yes. But despite its occasional longueurs, City of God suggests that it's possible indeed. --James Marcus

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2 1 false false Mon Apr 27 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 02 19:47:12 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 27 09:11:34 -0700 2009
Foremost, this is a thought provoking and interesting book. What I found unsettling abo...more...]]> 3 1 false false Tue Apr 14 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 24 19:51:35 -0700 2009 Tue Apr 21 23:59:09 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 1 false false Tue Apr 07 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Sep 12 17:13:23 -0700 2008 Sun Apr 12 07:24:39 -0700 2009 1 more...]]> 3 1 false false Thu Nov 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sun Nov 11 21:45:57 -0800 2007 Fri Nov 23 13:02:02 -0800 2007 more...]]> 1 1 false false Mon Apr 20 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 20 18:55:06 -0700 2009 Mon Apr 20 19:10:43 -0700 2009
I know, mash 'em up, and don't even try to meld the separate storylines...in fact, don't use commas or quote marks when characters speak. Throw in some Einsteinian ...more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu Apr 09 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Apr 07 04:50:21 -0700 2009 Sat Apr 11 04:22:06 -0700 2009 1 For quite a few pages I sat wondering what was going on, how are these fragments related - and is this book a work of genious or a work by a man, who couldn't write a...more...]]> 5 1 false false Mon Aug 17 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Aug 15 13:48:44 -0700 2009 Mon Aug 17 17:43:21 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Wed Mar 11 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu May 21 09:27:32 -0700 2009 Thu May 21 09:27:46 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Mon Jun 22 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Jun 09 07:00:27 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 22 17:25:51 -0700 2009
The beginning was too disjointed for me, and even though I enjoyed some of the perspectives, I'm too much a fan of being able to pick out a continuous storyline to say that I was really thrilled with the way things started out. Actually, to be enti...more...]]> 3 0 false false Sun Aug 09 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Aug 01 13:27:38 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 09 13:56:13 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Tue Mar 31 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Mar 13 08:43:07 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 31 12:23:48 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed May 06 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Apr 17 17:03:33 -0700 2009 Thu May 07 16:20:05 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Aug 30 12:41:48 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 30 12:48:20 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 09 20:45:33 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 09 20:51:02 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Fri Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Wed Feb 20 09:20:45 -0800 2008 Sun Feb 24 15:22:09 -0800 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false false Tue Aug 19 08:34:25 -0700 2008 Tue Aug 19 08:35:05 -0700 2008
A cross stolen from a Catholic church in ...more...]]> 3 0 false false Sun Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Mar 23 11:20:53 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 31 10:26:18 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 0 false false Thu Mar 12 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Mar 08 17:12:10 -0700 2009 Thu Mar 12 11:47:26 -0700 2009 more...]]> 1 0 false false Fri Oct 20 00:00:00 -0700 2000 Wed Aug 12 13:32:06 -0700 2009 Wed Aug 12 13:32:46 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 0 false false Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Jul 14 07:28:40 -0700 2008 Mon Aug 11 10:52:55 -0700 2008
It takes the form of a collage, almost - a bunch of interrelated snippets and stories including:

- First-person narratives from a priest who had his church's cross stolen

- First-person narratives from Doctorow's perspec...more...]]>