City of God

St. Augustine receives retribution. Set in the Babel of NYC, a yearning soon-to-be-ex priest (who could only be Episcopal) can disassociate from his belief but not his need for it. This self-referential novel may be too ambitious but definitely is looking at the stars. Ruminating on our cosmology, and whether that is just another story we tell ourselves, and our history (whose story is always changing) the characters attempt to find their belief structure as the 20C comes to a pre-Apocalyptic end. Resembling a sacred text, the novel includes stories, songs, historical references, traditions and questions without definitive answers: the reader, as with all humanity, is responsible for imposing meaning, for finding signs and wonders, show more ourselves.

Pros: some lyrical passages, great lines, an imaginative premise and a whirlwind tour of the 20C, does a good job of incorporating current cosmic knowledge as it reverberates against age old questions — if God did not exist would we have to invent him, how do we keep re-inventing a deity to better serve present needs, what is the true nature of good vs evil?

Cons: one suspects NYC is the center of the universe for Doctorow, there is no inclusion of an Islamic character (I don’t think it makes sense to talk about Christianity and Judaism without Islam, at least in a supporting role), and while the novel has its moments and can be deeply appreciated on an abstract, intellectual level, there ends up being no real resonance, no emotional connection. Disclosure: I am not Jewish, do not love NYC, and am not old enough to remember the 60s, all of which may help its enjoyment. In some ways it tries to be a contemporary version of Dostoevsky’s ‘Diary of a Writer’. There is such a thin line between a work being deeply personal and being self-indulgent, and I wouldn’t profess to know what that line is myself, but I was left thinking the book could have been better than it was: perhaps a wildly inspired author needs a wildly inspired editor.

Ultimately, the novel is a reflection of sacred text: the reader will take what resonates with them and leave the rest behind. show less

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 show more creates out of a patchwork of ideas a riveting novel. show less

An amazingly sweeping novel, which somehow transcends all the post-modern clichés we encounter in it. A Episcopal priest with views somewhat too radical for church authorities meets two equally radical Jewish rabbis after vandalism and theft from his church. In a kaleidoscopic presentation which brings in the Creation, Wittgenstein (as characters), the holocaust, Viet Nam, the First World War, (amazingly, without ever seeming to over-reach) the plot explores issues of the place of faith in the late 20th century. A masterpiece, only slightly diminished by the happy rom-com style ending in which the right people end up married, and the even more conventional post-apocalyptic postscript.

Parts of it were astounding and thought provoking, but as a whole too disjointed, too ambitious maybe. I can see what the attempt was, but it didn’t bring me along.

Imagine Miles Davis, Janis Joplin and Peter Tchaikovsky getting together at Carnegie Hall for one big symphonic music jam.

Now imagine that syncopated, bluesy, baton-waving overture translated from musical notes to printed words on a page.

That’s City of God, the newest novel from E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime, Billy Bathgate).

It’s been six years since Doctorow published his last novel, The Waterworks. Six long years for fans like me. The wait has been well worth it.

City of God is at once typically Doctorow; yet, at the same time, it is unlike anything else I’ve read. Postmodern in style, it shimmers with thought and energy that fairly explodes off the page with symphonic crescendos. It's told in so many different voices that sometimes it show more can be difficult to navigate the wildly varying passages. My advice? Just hang on and enjoy the ride.

To give you some indication of how explosive Doctorow’s book is, the novel comes out of the starting gate with a meditation on the Big Bang theory. It goes uphill from there.

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: book jacket blurbs and marketing campaigns have pigeon-holed this novel in the “mystery�€? category. Far from it. The only mystery in these pages centers around the deep questions of a soul in crisis, of a tiny human speck investigating a distant God.

Oh sure, there’s a bit of detective work at the start of City of God. A large brass cross is stolen from St. Timothy’s, an Episcopal church in lower Manhattan, and somehow winds up on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism on the Upper West Side. But that crime of desecration is just one small part of the book. It’s a springboard for Doctorow to launch into a variety of other larger, heavier themes; and, just like a fat man bouncing off the end of a diving board (then miraculously doing a graceful swan dive), Doctorow somehow pulls it all off. Meanwhile, the diving board is still reverberating with a resonant thwacka-thwacka sound.

So, you ask, what is City of God about? Very simply, it’s about everything. Life, death, and all that jazz in between.

In these pages, you’ll find a love triangle between an Episcopalian priest at the end of his faith, a female rabbi at the forefront of radical faith and a novelist who seems to have faith only in his words. There’s theological exegesis, movie plots, pop songs, poetry slams and numbered lists. There are smoky jazz clubs, Nazi death camps and World War I trenches. I’m only scratching the surface here, you understand.

Doctorow’s novel concentrates on thought, not plot. Nothing is linear, it’s all a fragmented hodgepodge of delirious language that eventually takes on a remarkable energy of its own.

Picture David Foster Wallace involved in a car crash with Don DeLillo, each of them on the way to their publishers with unbound manuscripts. And then, after the fenders are bent and the radiators are still hissing, imagine those two writers frantically scooping up their hopelessly shuffled and mixed pages. Those of you who have read Infinite Jest and Underworld—two sprawling, layered novels by each of those gentlemen—will start to guess at the scope I’m hinting at here. The mind boggles.

And that’s one problem with City of God. There were times I got so boggled that I bogged down. Doctorow has long been known for being a writer with a lot on his mind. Here, there’s so much that spills onto the page that it can be overwhelming. Some passages reminded me of those textbooks I had to plow through in the Religious Studies class I labored through back in college. If you’re the kind of person who can breeze through Tillich, Barth, Niebuhr or St. Augustine (obviously referenced by the book’s title), then this should be light reading. Me? I waded through those deep waters with a blurred brain.

But when I emerged, dripping wet, oh what wonders awaited me! For every thick-worded exposition on divinity, Doctorow came surging back with a more accessible passage that thrilled me to the core.

I realize I’ve come to the end of this review without giving any examples of the novel’s symphonic prose. What a crime! Words, after all, are Doctorow’s forte. Here, then, are just a few of my favorite passages…

The planet earth is blessed with water, great slops of it, swaying tonnage of saline ocean and sea, clear blue lakes and fish tremblant rivers, streams, brooks, rills, and pulsing springs, mountain runoffs, rains, mists, fogs, and hurricanes. At our birth billions of years ago, an amorphous heap of buzzingly radiant star spinoff, we melted inward to a core of iron and nickel, molten at its edges, and formed on top of this a hot rock mantle, and mineral crust. We began immediately to cool, thus creating enormous clouds of vapor, which rained down into the great craters and basins of rock until the seas were filled. The rock dissolved into soil, granulated into seabed, and the seabed granulates salinated and produced the first bubbling nitrogenized, oxygenized possibilities of blind, dumb life.

* * * * *

Lord, there is something so exhausted about the NY waterfront, as if the smell of the sea were oil, as if boats were buses, as if all heaven were a garage hung with girlie calendars, the months to come already leafed and fingered in black grease.

* * * * *

Or this vividly violent excerpt from the novelist’s “biographyâ€? of his father, a soldier in combat during World War I, rendered in free verse:

He stumbled over a young soldier lying
with the muzzle of his own rifle in his mouth
and his head resting in an amalgam
of brain and mud.
My father stopped and hunkered down and,
for the first time since coming to France,
felt close enough to someone to mourn him.
This boy had been unable to endure
the hours and hours of cannonade
that my father had barely heard
as he took upon himself the urgencies of battle.
But now it opened up on him, as if he were this fellow’s heir,
The terrible din, mechanical yet voiced as human,
a thunderous chest-beating boast of colossal,
spittingly cruel, brutish, and vindictive fury
which he imagined as the primordial conversation,
when a tank loomed above him, the muddied treads
rampaging in air,
and in a great grinding spankling roar
spanned the trench and brought a rain of oil
in the darkness upon him.

It’s rousing word-music like that which brings me to my feet in an ovation. Bravo, Mr. Doctorow, bravo! show less

There are some brilliant parts, but overall the book is too "writerly" for its own good.

Doctorow plays with recursion and and overly meta premise, with a novelist trying to corral an unruly pile of notes and ideas into a single work. It's pretentious and a bit on the nose, as this is exactly what we are reading. There are multiple separate stories only tenuously related to each other, with historical figures ranging from Einstein to Wittgenstein speaking in the first person, to war stories, the holocaust, and a modern day heist/romance. Interspersed are musings about religion, NYC, and the universe, seemingly lifted straight from a late night dorm room discussion, as young adults struggle with Deep Thoughts and coming to grips with show more their place in the world for the first time.

Thus we teeter from profound to profane, from insightful to mundane, resonant to half-baked, astute observations to banal filler. All the literary tricks in the world can't hide the fact that there really isn't enough quality material here to create a cohesive or compelling story, let alone a whole novel. show less

This is one of those books that i feel inadequate to the task. It seems that lots of people praise this book and find it to be an extraordinary literary piece but i simply do not see it. I read 120 pages in and had little idea of what i was supposed to be taking away from it.

I have experienced this before. I recall being younger -pre-teen and teen- and reading books that i did not grok. I read them again later with new eyes and found them to be full of meaning. Is this what is happening here? Am i just too stunted or stuck or underdeveloped to understand?

Whether i am or not, whether i come back to this book in years to come and find some profound significance to it then, i cannot say. What i know is that right now i do not get it and do show more not care and cannot follow it. It seems a nearly random set of pieces that drift back and forth across time and space and philosophical realms leading me to shake my head, pinch my nose, and utter an exasperated huff.

Doctorow’s prose is still nice to read and some of the musings about the nature of god and the universe mixed with memoirs from a Jewish ghetto during WWII really are poetic and beautiful. I just can’t make heads nor tails of what the hell is happening. Where is the larger context? I vaguely understand that a rabbi and priest are working together to figure out the whys and wherefores of a large cross stolen from the catholic church coming to reside on the roof of a synagogue. Then there is a man having an affair… that’s about all i can glean.

So, maybe when i’ve gained another 20 years of life experience or buckle down to teach myself how to read literary novels like this, i will find Deep Meaning in these pages. Until then, i am moving on to other books that i hope to enjoy. show less