City of God | E. L. Doctorow | A good novel as well as a lovely piece of writing

City of God | E. L. Doctorow | One of 4 books to bring me to tears (the good kind!)

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City of God

	City of God E. L. Doctorow Plume, 2001 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 86 reviews view larger image
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With brilliant and audacious strokes, the author of Ragtime and Billy Bathgate creates a breathtaking collage of memories, events, visions, and provocative thought, all centered on the idea of a modern reality of God. At the heart of this stylistically daring and dazzling inventive tour-de-force is a riveting detective story about a cross that vanishes from a Lower-East-Side church, only to reappear on the roof of an Upper-West-Side synagogue. Intrigued by the mystery-and by the Episcopal priest and female rabbi who investigate the strange desecration-is a well-known novelist whose capacious brain is a virtual repository for the ideas and disasters of the age.

Employing a multi-voiced narrative that perfectly captures the riffs and rhythms of latter-day New York, then broadens to implicate a cast of characters including scientists, war veterans, prelates, Holocaust survivors, cabinet members, theologians, filmmakers, and crooners, City of God is E. L. Doctorow's most ambitious and intensely personal work. Vast in scope, biblical in tone, it is a monumental work of spiritual reflection, philosophy, and history by America's preeminent novelist and chronicler of our time.

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A good novel as well as a lovely piece of writing

I enjoy EL Doctorow's work, so it was with pleasurable anticipation that I picked up City of God and was astonished at what a beautiful book he had wrought.

You should, when approaching this book, be aware that the narrative is experimental and postmodern. (It certainly fits every definition of postmodernism that I've ever read, including that in my favorite reference, Teaching the Postmodern.) Yes, it begins with a riff on physics and awe. It includes epistolary sections from characters to a character based on EL Doctorow.

There is also a strong narrative thread that keeps the book from becoming amorphous literary rap lyrics. An enormous bronze cross has been stolen, as is revealed on the fourth page, and its chase leads Tom Pemberton to Rabbi Joshua (the Hebrew name for Jesus, and I'm shocked that none of the other very intelligent reviewers here seem to have picked that one up, esp considering later plot developments,) and Sarah, his wife (very Da Vinci code, there.) Tom's interactions with Joshua form the, ahem, crux of the novel, and change Tom's life irrevocably.

While I, too, am astonished by the beauty of the book, and I appreciate the effect of all the narrative threads and their coalescence after the last page is turned, reading the book itself is an enjoyable experience. The characters are drawn nicely, there is excellent tension and struggle within the characters' lives, and the plot leads from one suspenseful scene to the next.

TK Kenyon
Author of Rabid: A Novel and Callous: A Novel

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One of 4 books to bring me to tears (the good kind!)

No, this is not a beach read, nor is it necessarily as gripping as Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, et al.

However, if you have time to invest in some thoughtful reading, Doctorow's 'City of God' is well worth it. The novel's ability to present the metaphysics of belief in an engaging way is remarkable, and upon finishing the novel, I could only feel grateful that an author like Doctorow chose to share such a wonderfully crafted piece of art.

A book to make you think

If you like Doctorow you'll enjoy this book, although it a bit different from his earlier writing...perhaps more overtly cerebral at least in the contemporary part (there is a subplot that takes place during World War II). Full of likeable but imperfect characters.

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This isn't Billy Bathgate

This isn't Billy Bathgate. This isn't Ragtime.
This is a complex work of literary fiction that pops around in time, place and voice.
But is it worth it?
As Kay says in Men In Black: "Yeah, it's worth it. If you're strong enough."

A mishmash

Doctorow has always liked to play with narrative structure and this book is no exception. Multiple narrators and narratives follow each other in multiple strands that ultimately do not hold together. Mostly in the form of notes the main narrator, Everett, has put together for (perhaps) two separate novels, it involves such disparate elements as: a sort-of detective story about the disappearance and reappearance of a cross (from the apse of an Episcopalian church to the roof of a Reform synagogue); the crises of faith of the priest of said church and his troubles with his hierarchy (who seem far more authoritarian than the real Episcopalian church); a holocaust narrative and another sort-of detective story about a ghetto's lost archive; various affairs, sexual or romantic, some without any connection to the main narrative; various fantasies in the form of imaginary film scripts, troubling in their depiction of sex, power and identity; long sections of prose poem (Everett's autobiography) and pseudo-philosphical riffs on jazz/Broadway standards by the fictional "Midrash Jazz Quartet"; numerous meditations on the origin of the universe and life, some quite inaccurate; passages on Einstein's life and (fictional) thoughts; and passages in the voice of Ludwig Wittgestein, many given in the form of numbered points as in his seminal book of philosophy Tractatus Logicophilosophicus.

If Doctorow could have made all this hang together, it would have been a work of rare achievement. Unfortunately, he fails. As a clear-eyed writer on class struggle in America, and what he sees as the capitalist corruption inherent in the American Dream, Doctorow has been brilliant, regardless of what one thinks of his politics. His attempt to grasp the metaphysical questions that humanity has struggled for millenia ("life, the universe and everything" as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" put it) is far less successful. I still give him a three because of evocative writing and daring narrative structure. But compared to his other novels, this one falls short.

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