City of God, by E.L. Doctorow

I recently picked up E.L. Doctorow’s City of God in a Borders outlet, with nothing more to go on than a vague recognition of the author’s name and a series of accolades and titles in the otherwise-sparse biography. No synopsis, no foreword, no recommendations save the “3-for-2” sticker slapped on its front. The older gentlemen manning the register paused at it for a moment among my other purchases. “My wife tells me I need to read Doctorow,” he commented, and I toted the book home, quite intrigued.

But for many readers, it will take more than spontaneous bookstore intrigue to get very far into Doctorow’s meaty novel. With frequent, manic-like shifts in voice, perspective, and plot thread, as well as a thematic arsenal that includes art, theology, war, the Holocaust, love, history, and the will of God, Doctorow demands focus and acuity from his audience. Those who make it past the first few chapters, however, stand to uncover the subtle virtuosity of Doctorow’s story-telling - an authorial drive that compels readers to follow through to the insightful and cathartic end.

The story is, at its most basic, the tale of urban life in New York. Readers follow along with the self-proclaimed “Divinity Detective” Reverend Thomas Pemberton (“Pem”), an Episcopal minister searching for the thief who stole his church’s gilt cross and, whether in good humor or twisted irony, placed it on the roof of the “Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism” in Manhattan. The novel’s frame is a narrative told by Pem’s friend Everett, a writer simultaneously consumed with his recent split from his wife and the hauntingly personal implications of his friends’ theology. Doctorow’s work here is grounded in this theological conversation, which he incorporates into the plot via, among other techniques, a weekly religious discussion at the “Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism.” A smattering of intellectual New Yorkers gather under the leadership of Rabbi Sarah of the Synagogue for insight and opposition. But underneath the book’s theological discussion, however, are myriad interjectory narratives, from Albert Einstein and a host of fictional others. The most captivating is that of Sarah’s father, who tells of his youth in a Jewish ghetto during WWII.

But one refreshing source of commentary, if just for the page breaks, is the Midrash Jazz Quartet’s snappy lyrics, which provide margin notes on the debate, the action, and the will of God in general, as well as the usual lost love and musicians’ hardships. “Midrash” here is an important operative word - Doctorow’s work as a whole simultaneous recreates the accounts of Scripture, both in variant tone, style, and subject, but also simulates the function of ancient Hebraic texts in self-exegeting the Scriptures. As theology drifts into science, politics, history, and human suffering, we find both Doctorow’s brisk intellect and his highly self-actualized narrators providing endless commentary. The discussion weaves in and out of the plot and extends to the reader, and the resulting thought and pace of the novel has both an urgency and a restrained meandering quality.

Doctorow’s aggressive style, which may appear as loose or sloppy construction, nonetheless encases a vivid and engaging conversation. Despite powerful, monologue-style presentation and a single dominant voice, the work is overtaken by its conversational and communal qualities. As Doctorow tackles the meta-themes of human existence, he skillfully distills them into the thoroughly human realities of inner city life, divorce, church in the modern age, friendship, crime, love, and God. The novel begins with the creation of the universe, and ends with the belief of a single man. Doctorow’s handling of this dualistic nature of his narrative is perhaps his greatest strength in City of God. In a statement nestled near the middle of the novel, he appears almost confessional about his literary gymnastics: “and if it is true that a sociopath can never show restraint but must go on and on in ever greater amplification of his evil until he is destroyed, so must an author honor the character of his idea and allow it to express itself in all its wretched insufficiency until it too reaches its miserable end.”

While much of Doctorow’s theological questioning is both constructive and engaging, his treatment of faith occasionally veers into near-bullying. The Episcopal Church bears most of the brunt of his maltreatment, and yet often theologically and practically resembles more the Roman Catholic Church (for example, since when do Episcopal priests refer to church authorities as “the See”?). In perhaps a weaker portion of the novel, faith is reduced to simply the ability to engage in the theological dialogue: Pemberton claims that, in Judaism, he has found all of the benefits of Christianity (Doctorow’s version of Christianity, that is) without Christ, his one nagging reservation. While the questions - of God, of church authority, of religious practice in the modern age - are constructive, it is when Doctorow tries to provide definitive answers that his voice is most weak.

Although it does not have the subtlety or beautiful transcendence of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, City of God is quite like an urban version of that spiritual narrative, as another novel that boldly interacts with the questions of God at work in humanity. And while Robinson’s work is much like a prayer, one critic has similarly called City of God a “great jazz riff.” There is certainly a playful, improvisatory, and all-or-nothing quality to it, but the novel is also grounded in paradox: complex and simple, expansive and focused, reflective and vibrant. It requires the reader’s engagement and patience to withstand the burgeoning questions of the novel’s first half and see them satisfyingly fleshed out in the end.