Product Description

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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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #255343 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-01
• Released on: 2001-01-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
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:

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?

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

From Publishers Weekly
New York at the end of the 20th century--hardly St. Augustine's city of God--is the canvas on which Doctorow paints an impressionistic portrait of man's frail moral nature and the possibilities of redemption. Challenging and provocative, this rambling narrative is a mix of alternating voices that touch on such matters as theology, popular music, astronomy, physics and science, war, carnal love, the verisimilitude of film to life (and distortions thereof). The story is at first difficult to discern, because the abruptly changing voices are not identified. But the episodic selections prove to be passages in a notebook kept by a writer called Everett, who is searching for inspiration for a novel. The easiest thread to follow, since it ties together and finally illuminates the other voices, is Everett's interest in a mysterious theft. In the fall of 1999, the brass cross from the altar of an Episcopal church in the East Village is stolen--and later discovered on the roof of an alternative synogogue on the Upper West Side. Fr. Thomas Pemberton, the spiritually restless rector of St. Timothy's, finds a kindred soul in iconoclastic Rabbi Joshua Gruen, the leader of the Evolutionary Judaism congregation. Together they probe the validity of religion in a century that has fostered epic barbarism and bloodshed. In fugal counterpoint to their conversations, the rabbi's wife, Sarah Blumenthal, herself a rabbi, discloses the story of her father's ordeals during the Holocaust, in which he tells of a manuscript hidden in the ghetto. Ensuing events cause a gentle, grieving Sarah and an unmoored Pem, whose chronic despair, intellectual arrogance and religious skepticism have cost him his pulpit, to draw together in need and understanding. This is merely the scaffolding of a story that ranges from stark tragedy to absurdist comedy, that includes quotations from popular songs from the first three decades of this century as well as speculations on infinity, a scenario for a sadistic love affair, the observations of a bird watcher, a free verse account of a WWII air battle, a consideration of the scientific discoveries that unleashed methodical human extermination and marvelous progress, minibios of Albert Einstein and Frank Sinatra, and the tenets of Christian and Jewish liturgy. Despite the fractured structure, suspense intensifies as the various segments intersect. Doctorow's language is both lyric and bracing, a mix of elegant, precise wordplay and brash vernacular. In a masterwork of characterization, he depicts a gallery of characters (including, hilariously, a retired New York Times editor who becomes an avenging angel) with vivid economy. At once audacious and assured, this profound existential inquiry will surely be ranked as a brilliant mirror of our life and times. 7-city author tour. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
What is one to make of this audio? Opening with a meditation on the Big Bang, the tape segues into what initially appears to be a mystery about a large cross disappearing from a church and reappearing at a synagogue. Soon, we hear dazzling conversations on the nature of faith, a Holocaust narrative, a loony-tunes contribution by Ludwig Wittgenstein, then Albert Einstein. Does all this cohere into a story? Not really, though Doctorow (Ragtime) clearly has larger concerns here than mere entertainment, concerns about the nature of God and man!s relationship to Him. Thomas Pemberton, priest of the church whose cross disappeared, serves as the main vehicle for these explorations, chronicling the mutation of his faith in language that is a real treat to listen to. The abridgment of the book does this tape no favors; given Doctorow!s already elliptical style, too much gets left out. Still, John Rubinstein!s reading accommodates a variety of voices and accents with ease, which, with the author!s reputation and verbal facility, makes this a safe purchase, though one that may leave some listeners baffled.?John Hiett, Iowa City P.L.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Customer Reviews

A laborious route to a magnificent ending
I waited until I finished reading Doctorow's "City ofGod" before reading any reviews of this book - not sure why Imade that choice but once made I was thankful I had. If you're looking for his usual mix of historical fact with fascinating fiction, don't try this work. Work? Yes, that is exactly what this book is. And after wading through alot of pages that begged editing, I started over. City of God takes us back to college days, when we wandered from Philosophy to Religion to History to Psychology to Physics and to Biology classes. None of it pulls together until all the courses are finished THEN the magnificence of Doctorow's mind is appreciated. There is a good novel buried in this book, but the true rewards are found in Doctorow's philosphical excursions. His exploration of the beginning of the universe, his mingling the various philosophies that address man's condition and his search for meaning in a abusively chaotic cosmos, his paring down the tennants of Jewish and Christian thought - all these are done with enormous skill and read even better when approached a second and third time. Sometimes he is out of his territory - as when he maligns us with the oh-so-corny reinterpretations of banal songs. But Wow! this man's mind is impressive. And for those hardy readers who commit to finishing this literary task the retrospective gratification is magnificent!

City of God
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.

A veteran author comes of age.
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.