City of God

Dear Polly,

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Given the reviews, I expected not to like this book at all, and I do understand why most of the reviewers were disappointed. The plot is scanty, bordering on nonexistent--considered an unforgivable sin in fiction these days, probably as a result of Doctorow's bugaboo, the mindlock of cinematic storytelling. But Doctorow squanders the several intriguing story germs he has, teasingly setting up and then confounding readers' expectations of a real tale. (Was the avenging ex-Times-editor assassin a real character or a fantasy sketch of a character, and why does he disappear? Who hoisted the stolen crucifix onto the synagogue's roof, and for what reason?) These bits of self-conscious pleasure-denial remind me why I didn't love much of the blue-chip literary fiction of the 1970s, even though at the time I was part of the precious-young-intelligentsia demographic that was supposed to groove on Donald Barthelme and John Hawkes and Robert Coover--all the Borges manqués whose fictions preened and reveled in their own tricky artificiality. Telling a story and inviting the reader's suspension of disbelief seemed beneath them, as it seems beneath Doctorow here.

For the first quarter of City of God, it's unclear who the narrator is, and then, possibly as an on-the-fly attempt to resolve the murkiness, Doctorow lets us know that the novel we're reading is a novel within a novel (containing movie treatments within movie treatments), and that a secondary character is, after all, a novelist ("the" novelist?) who is fictionalizing his apostate-priest friend's life. The 60ish novelist's name is Ev, short for Everett; Doctorow's name is Ed, short for Edgar. Near the end of the book, as an ironic apology for describing one of the characters' finances, someone (Ev the "novelist" or Doctorow, it's unclear) asks rhetorically, "How can anyone write a proper novel without talking about money?" The use of quotation marks around dialogue is inconsistent, practically random. All the postmodern tics seem half-hearted and old-hat and beside the point. And wrong, given the book's ripe, important subjects--cosmology and belief in God and the Christian culpability in the Holocaust.

There's too much newspapery boilerplate about multicultural Manhattan. ("Young black man crossing the street against the traffic, glaring, imperious, making his statement. ... The migrant wretched of the world, they think if they can just get here, they can get a foothold. Run a newsstand, a bodega, drive a cab, peddle ... handsome West Indians, scared and pale 18-year-olds from Queens, sturdy young Latinos in tropical colors, stylish, lots of laughter, ready to break out dancing.") There are minor factual errors (Doctorow has the speed of light 1,000 times too fast) and implausibilities (a woman who was a Credence Clearwater fan as a late-'70s youth). The interstitial verse I could do without. Also, I don't understand why the hero, who yearns for "Christianity without Christ," doesn't at least consider Unitarianism on his way from Episcopalianism to Judaism.

But all that said, reading City of God was for me a pleasurable, intellectually engaging few hours. I enjoyed watching Doctorow think and pontificate. And I guess that's because, like him, I find myself unable to embrace either atheism or conventional religion, and because, like him, I resort for my experience of divine awe to the revelations of physics and astronomy. I share his hopeful dream of some kind of alloy of scientific and spiritual insight. I also share his view that Christians generally and Catholics specifically got off way too easy after the Holocaust.

[W]hat mortification, what ritual, what practice might have been a commensurate Christian response. ... Something as earth-shattering as Auschwitz and Dachau. ... A mass exile? A lifelong commitment of millions of Christians to wandering, derelict, in the world? A clearing out of the lands and cities a thousand miles in every direction from each and every death camp?

The most compelling and satisfyingly novel-like sections of the book are, in fact, concerned with story of the orphaned Jewish boy in Lithuania during the Holocaust. (It was also in one of those passages, in which Doctorow attributes the phrase "Jew miscreant" to the Nazis, that I realized the linguistic precedent for the Republicans' bullying transformation of "Democrat" from noun to adjective--as in "Democrat politician"--over the last 15 years.)

And there is plenty of good, smart writing in City of God. As when the Yalie priest Pem, after his crucifix is stolen, muses on the crooks:

These mindless thieves of the valueless who go giggling through the streets, carrying what? whatever it is! through the watery precincts of urban nihilism ... their wit their glimmering recognition of something that once had a significance they laughingly cannot remember. Jesus, there's not even sacrilege there. A dog stealing a bone knows more what he's up to.

And Pem again, after he abandons the priesthood:

The cross is society giving you permission to express concern for another human being. ... If you're a priest, a rabbi, a nun, people know you've dropped out of the material culture. They accept it, they may not believe what you have to say, or care that much, but they listen to you.

One other note: It's interesting that American fiction right now seems to be in the thrall of heroes who are white, middle-aged, pot-smoking professional men undergoing professional/existential angst--Pem in City of God, the Kevin Spacey character in American Beauty, the Michael Douglas character in Wonder Boys.

Kurt

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This week, a discussion of E.L. Doctorow's City of God (click hereto read an excerpt and hereto buy it). Kurt Andersen was architecture critic for Time, a founder of Spy, and the editor of New York magazine, and is a founder of Powerful Media, which this spring will launch a Web-based news, analysis, and data service for the entertainment and media businesses. His first novel, Turn of the Century, was published last May (click hereto buy it). Polly Shulman is a frequent Slate contributor. She will be the Sunday book reviewer for Newsday starting in April.

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