City of God

Polly:

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We agree too much.

One final thing that bugged me about the book was the boring, knee-jerk paleoliberalism--e.g., "You find invariably among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as an entitlement."

I think you may be right that Doctorow can do what he does best only when he's writing about history, that only by reconstructing the past is he able really to believe his own fictions. And I suspect that's partly a function of a basic inability or unwillingness to regard the present as anything other than debased and depressing. When he (that is, one of his characters) harrumphs about the word "infrastructure," for instance, but then romanticizes the elevated trains, it occurred to me that "el" is precisely the kind of industrial-age neologism that Doctorow, had he been writing in 1910, would have harrumphed about.

No, Sarah Blumenthal isn't much of a character. She's more of a PC middle-aged man's fantasy--just as the very briefly glimpsed Miss Warren, the cartoonishly tough-as-nails young New Yorker war correspondent, is an old-school desk jockey's fantasy of slutty young womanhood. In fact, there's only one fully realized character in the book, as far as I'm concerned, and that's Pem, the priest-in-crisis. (Strange, though, isn't it, that Mr. Sensitivity is so coolly indifferent to--even contemptuous of--his own two daughters?)

Among other virtues, Pem has a sense of humor, for which one is grateful in a book where every flash of wit feels thirst-quenching. When he first arrives at Sarah's little ad hoc synagogue and spots exercise gear, he thinks, "I deduce Evolutionary Judaism includes aerobics." And later, listening to the whiny new recruits to Evolutionary Judaism: "I now added to the code a 614^th mitzvah, the ritual obligation to work the rabbi over before you deigned to join her congregation."

It's interesting, as A.O. Scott pointed out in the Times Book Review on Sunday, that for someone who has made an awful lot of money from Hollywood, Doctorow larded this book with all these non sequitur anti-movie rants ... which I guess were intended to chastise the reader for his or her philistine disappointment at the lack of narrative tidiness.

Speaking of Hollywood: Nick Nolte as Pem? Or Gene Hackman? Julia Roberts as Sarah? William Hurt as Ev? And speaking further of pop culture: After the obese Nobel physicist Seligman delivers his show-stopping speech about the nature of the next messiah, Pem says to Ev, "I'm not attributing anything to the slob ... [but] if there is a religious agency in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the street in traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else." Do you think this subtextual Joan Osborne allusion ("What if God was one of us/ Just a slob like one of us/ Just a stranger on the bus ...") was unwitting?

During one of Pem's soliloquies about how the Holocaust made religious faith impossible--a God who would allow genocide is not a God one can believe in, let alone love--I thought Doctorow was going to launch some kind of fundamentalist case against the Enlightenment. He didn't, but see what you think of this: If Enlightenment rationalism sprang from and reinforced a diminishing belief in God in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and if Nazism was in some sense the 20^th century's cancerous outgrowth of the Enlightenment project, which (as Doctorow suggests) put the final nail in God's coffin, is it not possible that the erasure of faith isn't just a collateral effect of the Enlightenment but its very point, with Nazism and the Holocaust the satanic coup de grâce?

See, I really did get into the spirit of the novel. Maybe I should go on The 700 Club to discuss this theory further.

Over to you,
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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