City of God

Dear Kurt,

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Like you, when I read City of God, I found myself weighing impulses of irritation against pleasure and admiration, balancing the sides on a pivot of "But all that said ..." Yes, Doctorow's continual undercutting of his own narrative seemed smugly disrespectful of readers--first he teases us by seeming to promise drama, then withholds it and scolds us for craving it. The technique was already passé when Umberto Eco used it in the Name of the Rose, decades ago, and I didn't like it then. Yes, Doctorow's interwoven narration is confusing and makes readers work too hard--would it have killed the guy to label the sections "Ev," "Pem," "Einstein," "Wittgenstein," and so on, so we could tell who was talking? He could still have made his point (a rather obvious one anyway) that a Novelist is controlling all the narratives, that we're not really hearing Einstein's voice, we're hearing it through Ev's imagination, through Ed's. Yes, the New York world in City of God looks a bit like a fashion ad, with its p.c. mix of hipsters, addicts, immigrants.

And I found some extra irritants you didn't mention: the saintly Rabbi Sarah Blumenthal, for one, who wins the hearts of the priest and both novelists despite having a blank where her character should be. "I imagined that I might at last find my salvation in an authentic life with this woman," writes Pem. "She lives in some genuine state of integrity almost beyond belief [now there's an understatement], a woman of unstudied grace, with none of the coarse ideologies of the time adhered to her."

Then there are all the tired science metaphors: ants standing in for human society, the Big Bang standing in for God. And the science is shot through not just with clichés but with errors. Doctorow--or, to give him the benefit of the doubt, his narrator--doesn't seem to know the difference between a gene (a piece of DNA that codes for a characteristic protein) and a genome (all the DNA that defines a species). He doesn't seem to know that species can be singular, that specie means money in the form of coins. These errors, though minor in themselves, suggest that the novelist (whichever one) doesn't respect the intellectual field he's borrowing from enough to learn its most basic vocabulary.

But all that said, I continue to delight in Doctorow's jubilant language, his passion for the city I love, and his powerful storytelling skills, which occasionally find their way into this novel, however hard he tries to exclude them.

For instance, some bits I liked: Pem standing "at Astor Place in the shadow of the great mansarded brownstone voluminous Cooper Union people's college with the birds flying up from the square." Another bird image:

An odd sighting on the dock, a great blue heron looking out one way, almost back to back with a snowy-white egret peering in the opposite direction. ... With the same food sources, I wonder that they get along, but there they stand with that mutual disregard. I'm not looking, but I know you're there. The egret breaks first, the neck outstretched, the yellow bayonet beak extended, a beautiful bird in flight, sleek, like a Pre-Raphaelite seaplane, but with merciless eyes ... and the heron, looking rumpled with its round black shoulder patch. ... It is a less comely bird, a less spiffy bird than the egret, although with its huge wingspan as it takes off low over the water it does achieve an airliner's stateliness. But there is a degree of sorrow in its gaze.

Without pushing the metaphor, or even suggesting it explicitly, Doctorow uses the birds to compare religions coexisting in the same society, competing for the same--or perhaps entirely different--spirits.

I often thought, reading this book, that where he went wrong was in setting it in the present. What do you think? As you point out, the most compelling narrative is the story of a boy in a Jewish ghetto in Lithuania during the Holocaust. Doctorow's novels set in the past seem much more vital than this one, as if the temporal distance were a mask that freed him to express himself without embarrassment.

"I bought half a dozen used paperback detective novels. To learn the trade," the priest tells us early on, then immediately takes it back: "I'm lying, Lord. I just read the damn things when I'm depressed. The paperback detective speaks to me." I wish, instead of wincing at his own love of narrative, Doctorow would run with it, as he did in Ragtime, for example.

Yours,
Polly

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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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