City of God

Polly:

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I noticed last night in "The Fray" that the one posting about us was from a guy who thought we didn't like the novel. So much for scrupulous ambivalence (us) and close readers (him).

I guess the reason I did like the book (B? B-minus?) despite its flaws (my final significant cavil: the flashback sex scene between Pem and the Pacific island girl--reading it, I cringed on Doctorow's behalf) is that it takes its big ideas very seriously ... maybe too seriously, or anyway too much at the expense of character and story. In other words, and not to be patronizing, I liked it because it's old-fashioned and earnest--even the meta-fiction bullshit seems old-fashioned and earnest to me.

I love your idea of casting dead movie stars--a whole new parlor game ... to which Microsoft presumably now owns the online rights. (A parlor game that suggests a Ragtime movie starring Paul Robeson and Jean Arthur and ... well, and James Cagney as the police chief.)

As to your Questions for Further Review from yesterday:

No, of course Doctorow doesn't believe that the erasure of faith was the point of the Enlightenment, with the Holocaust as a corollary. His connection of the Holocaust and faithlessness simply inspired me to try to connect more historical and philosophical dots. Which the book prompted me to do a lot, and which is precisely why I found it enjoyable.

Do Doctorow or Pem or Sarah pray God into being? I guess they do, for themselves ... but I'm not buying it. While I share, as I said before, Doctorow's sense of the fungibility of scientific and spiritual understanding, I'm afraid I still find "God" an unnecessary, quaint, vestigial word for the sum of those understandings. I don't think I'll ever be able to say or think about God except in quotation marks, no matter how much I pray--and besides, I don't pray...unless staring at the sky on a clear summer night with my daughters is a form of prayer. (But 'prayer' seems to me an unnecessary, quaint, vestigial, etc.)

Is Pem's conversion Doctorow's revenge for centuries of forced conversion in the other direction? It seems plausible. More charitably, I think it may also be a Jew's sensible fictional prescription for any squishily liberal Christian: that is, if you don't really believe Christ was the son of God, and you don't really believe in transubstantiation or any of the rest of that nonsense, why exactly are you a Christian? It's why I'm not, and why I've always felt more spiritual kinship with Jews than with (non-Unitarian) Christians, and why I allowed two priests to officiate at my wedding only on the condition that they not mention Jesus during the ceremony. It's the Pem in me, I guess.

The other reason I'm glad I read this book is because it's allowed me to (virtually) chat with you. Bye.

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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