City of God

Dear Kurt,

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Oh, would you like me to disagree? OK. No, no, no, not Julia Roberts: Sarah's awful sincerity! Julia's dazzling teeth! Though I guess it would be better than casting Minnie Driver, which you know someone would try to do. Still, shouldn't we be thinking of historical movie stars, since we agree this ought to be a historical novel? Let's say Ingrid Bergman for Sarah Blumenthal, Jimmy Stewart for Pem, and Groucho Marx for Ev.

But you're right to move on to what Doctorow clearly considers the more important aspect of the book: religion and philosophy. You propose the erasure of faith as the point of the Enlightenment, with the Holocaust as a corollary. Hmm. Do you think Doctorow believes that? Can a man who pretends to like science? On the one hand, we have Einstein, the anti-Hitler, appearing in the book, making predictably adorable, humane remarks. On the other hand, we have Murray Seligman, a classmate of Ev's from the Bronx High School of Science, now a Nobel laureate in physics, still "Murray the jerk who nearly blew up chem lab," glorifying God as "the Creator, blessed be His name, who can make solid reality, or what we perceive as reality, out of indeterminate, unpredictable wave/particle functions." These are two supreme rationalists, one saintly, one jerkly, both faithful to God despite the Enlightenment. Doctorow seems to be working hard here to bring together two ways of thinking that aren't particularly opposed, just different. I think he means reason isn't what threatens religion, evil is.

In the ghetto narrative, a group of resistance fighters offer ghetto prisoners a chance to escape:

And before lowering himself through the trapdoor, [one of the resistance fighters] addressed Rabbi Pomeranz: Since your prayers are so effective and have already done so much good, you, I expect, will choose to remain and pray to the Lord your God to save your people. When he had gone and the desk was back in place, the rabbi stood and set his battered homberg firmly on his head as he prepared to go out. That's not why I pray to the Lord, blessed be His name, he said to no one in particular. I pray to bring Him into being.

Is that what Doctorow, or Pem, or Sarah is trying to do? Do you think they succeed?

And what about the whole conversion plot? (Readers who plan to read City of God despite all our whining, and who don't want the surprises--such as they are--spoiled, may wish to skip this paragraph.) By having Pem abandon Christianity in favor of Judaism, is Doctorow taking revenge for centuries of forced conversion in the other direction? By declaring himself a Jew, is Pem co-opting Jewish suffering to exonerate himself? Is Pem enacting penance for the Holocaust--a Christlike act of taking on someone else's sins, since, after all, he's no Nazi? Who's a Christian here, and who's a Jew? Pem (I think it's Pem) suggests that the problem with Christianity wasn't with Jesus but with his followers who turned him into a god, echoing a remark Doctorow gives to Einstein: "I will say here of poor Jesus, that Jew, and the system in his name, what a monstrous trick history has played on him."

I also found it questionable, given Doctorow's much-trumpeted distrust of the emotional manipulations of narrative, that the only real, compelling story in his book is the Holocaust-survival adventure. I don't myself believe that narrative is necessarily manipulative, but if Doctorow does, shouldn't he hesitate to borrow such a loaded one? There is some discussion in the book between Ev and Sarah about how he fictionalized her father's childhood, what sources he used, and so on, but she gives him an approval stamp, telling him he got at the essential truth of the story. Seems like Doctorow patting himself on the back or excusing himself.

When Pem is courting Sarah, he and Ev join her Torah study services. Ev comments,

as a writer, I am only fascinated by the power of this hodgepodge of chronicles, verses, songs, relationships, laws of the universe, sins, and days of reckoning ... this scissors-and-paste job that is in its original form so terse, inconsistent, defiant of common sense, and cryptically inattentive to the ordinary demands of narrative as to be attributed to a divine author.

This sounds to me like Doctorow describing his own book. What an ambition--to write such a mess you appear divine!

What do you think, Kurt? Shall you and I give it a shot?

Best,
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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