CITY OF GOD
by E.L. Doctorow

Now that we’ve all marched triumphantly into the new American century, here comes E.L. Doctorow with his first contemporary novel in nearly thirty-five years, to suggest that the basic dogmas and rituals of all leading Western religions are hopelessly archaic, even destructive, and that they should be replaced by a new, quasi-secular, democratic faith based in good part on the living example of—New York City.

"I found myself writing a sermon, and I didn’t know why," recalls Doctorow, still sounding a little surprised by the process that produced his new novel, City of God. "I wanted to look at our perception or awareness of what is holy or sacred now."

This is Doctorow’s first, full-length, contemporary novel since Big as Life , which few of even his most devoted readers have ever heard of. There is a good reason for this: Doctorow has always considered the book a failure, and has refused to allow it to be reprinted or translated since its original appearance in 1966.

Yet to quote John L. Lewis, "Even the derriere of a great man is not without interest." Big as Life was a bold, freewheeling experiment, the story of what happens when a pair of gargantuan, humanoid figures appear overnight in New York’s East River. They seem to have come from some other part of the universe, or even the space-time continuum, and move with almost infinitesimal slowness in our world. One of the figures is slightly injured by a passing airliner, and the whole city watches as, over the course of months, he slowly bleeds, raises a hand to his wounded head, and cries out in pain.

It is a haunting image—one which, in the novel, undermines nearly all of society’s most cherished theological and scientific notions. A religious hysteria sweeps the city, riots break out, commerce comes to a standstill. Millions flee the city, and the military moves in to establish martial law.

Much of this is endemic to the time when Big as Life was written—as the middle-class fled to the suburbs, strike followed upon financial crisis followed upon blackout, and New York City staggered from one long, hot summer to the next. Yet it also reflects its author’s continuing fascination with the ideas of quantum physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and how our exponentially expanding knowledge of the physical world has come to alter our whole vision of God. If there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our previous philosophies—what do we do?

This fascination with the physical world is brought to fruition in Doctorow’s new, equally daring City of God. Is City of God the novel he was trying to write instead of Big as Life, back in 1966?

"There may be some resonances," he concedes, seeming startled by the question, and working it over in his mind as he speaks.

"I was always mad at myself for letting it [Big as Life] be published then, as it was, but I always thought that some day I would make it work," he adds, with a writer’s typical, gnawing dissatisfaction with the finished product—the idea that given some theoretically infinite number of days, he can make any book work.

The day has arrived, and the device he has hit upon in City of God is the "emptying out of a writer’s notebook." Doctorow’s rather shadowy main narrator is a writer named Everett, which allows him often spectacular leeway in telling his story.

Everett’s days are taken up with various metaphysical speculations—and writing about his friend, the Rev. Thomas "Pem" Pemberton, pastor of the decrepit, crime-ridden, nearly forgotten St. Timothy’s Episcopal church on New York’s Lower East Side. Pem is extremely WASP; Yale-educated, middle-aged, in the midst of a divorce from his heiress wife and a crisis of faith. He is also flummoxed when an eight-foot, hollow brass cross is stolen from St. Timothy’s and discovered a few days later on the roof of a brownstone on West 98th Street.

This is the home—and place of worship—of an idyllic married couple, the rabbis Joshua Gruen and Sarah Blumenthal. Their small, fledgling Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism is itself a quest, a gently radical, intellectual attempt to break all of Jewish tradition down to its first, basic elements—and they soon join Pem in attempting to discover not so much who put the cross on their roof, or why, but what it all means. This is an approach obviously fraught with peril. One wrong turn and you’re in the worst of Graham Greene territory, a fate amply illustrated by the recent, big screen version of The End of the Affair, oozing treacle and miracles from every pore. World-weary sophisticate in need of something to believe in; cue God.

Yet Doctorow pulls it off, with the help of a brave and formidable intellect, an enduring skepticism, and some bravura writing. Let’s start with the writing—and let’s start by acknowledging that Doctorow is beyond doubt one of the best practicioners of the art now extant. For years, his books have been electrified by rich, heady rushes of word and action that leave the reader breathless. His descriptions of urban life are easily as lush, perceptive, and wryly humorous as anything by Dom DeLillo. He has always been willing to experiment; his last work, The Waterworks (1994), was a slim, eerie, historical mystery that put Caleb Carr to shame.

Yet more often he has worked with a scalpel, excelling in his ability to convey a whole time, a world, a scene in a relatively conventional sentence or two. Here is his bone-chilling summary of Boss Tweed’s New York, in The Waterworks: "Can you imagine what it is like to live in a city of thieves, raucous in their dissembling, a city falling into ruins, a society in name only?" Or there is a splendid, single paragraph in City of God, where a suvivor of a Jewish ghetto during the Second World War, describes how he had learned what adult love was by watching how his parents treated each other even under such conditions.

Yet City of God is Doctorow’s great jazz riff, its constantly shifting voices, perspectives, and settings allowing him to embark upon a dazzling array of intellectual inquiries. In a running series of "leitmotifs" he calls on Einstein to talk about the Big Bang and the nature of light, and the theory of relativity, and Wittgenstein to talk about philosophy and reality (Oh, come on, it’s not that hard. You remember it from that freshman survey course: Nothing that can be seen can truly be described.), and, in an amazing tour de force, Old Blues Eyes Himself, Frank Sinatra, to talk about his early days in Hoboken and the nature of popular songs.

Like many of the stories in City of God, you get the feeling that the Sinatra soliloquy could easily be expanded into an entire novel. The conceit is that Frank is sitting in with the hilariously named Midrash Jazz Quartet, which Doctorow uses to analyze old standards and to speculate about how it is that great popular songs seem as if they have always existed, just waiting to be written down—as if they, like hymns, are almost a natural, intrinsic part of the universe.

Part and parcel of Doctorow’s intellect, as it must be of any fine mind, is a tempered, liberal, urbane skepticism, which has informed his work for years and which enables Pem to escape the role of Jimmy Stewart, looking for a convenient angel. Pem proves to be no weak reed in the wind, but a very rugged Jacob, able to wrestle God to more than a standstill. The assault Doctorow has him lead on God—that is, the traditional, specific God of all Western religions—is two-fold, launched from both what we now know about the nature of the cosmos (Augustine’s City of God?) and from mankind’s own, tormented history (the City of Man?)

Doctorow’s ruminations on the nature of life, on the intricacy and the sheer vastness of the universe make up the first part of this assault. "These are ideas that compose our sense of art and life at this time," he explains, "…the whole culture of knowledge that swings our mass sensibility"—and to Everett and Pem, they have made the whole concept of a God Whose concern for us and Whose will we can discern in any way, absolutely ridiculous.

For Doctorow, as for Einstein, the astounding complexity of the universe we know seems to imply some intelligence behind it all—but not one that we can possibly comprehend. For Pem, this is crucial in defining the nature of God:

"The sensation of God in us is a total sensation given to the whole being, revelatory, inspired. That is the usual answer to the questioning intellect, which by itself cannot realize sacred truth. But is the intellect not subsumed? Does the whole being not include the intellect? Why wouldn’t the glory of God shine through to the human mind?"

The conundrum here is that science, ultimately, fails to provide any real substitute—just as, in Big as Life, it should not be scientifically possible for the gigantic figures to exist. It’s all well and good, for instance, to talk about the whole, apparently infinite universe expanding from the Big Bang theory—but what did it expand into? Doctorow’s second assault is based in good part upon the history of the Holocaust, and all of the other astonishingly nasty things human beings have done to each other in the century just past. Religion would seem to have firmer ground to stand on here. After all, haven’t most of the culprits over the past hundred years—Nazis, Communists, extreme nationalists—been deliberately trying to supplant traditional religions? Doctorow isn’t buying. As he sees it, "The demonization, the dehumanization of others is essentially a religious idea. Nazism is a form of state religion."

And yet. And yet. Did the dehumanization of the other really begin with what we think of as religion? Or did it start the first time two wandering bands of hominids encountered each other somewhere on the Serengeti? After all, a disturbing number of North American Indian clans, practicing only the most minimal of animist rituals, had names such as "the human beings" for themselves, and "the head smashers/cannibals/dog people" for the tribe over the next hillock.

Which leads to what is one of the most intriguing and polemical aspects of City of God, Doctorow’s suggestion that we need to break down these antiquated faiths and make something new. Pem ultimately rejects his calling, insisting that "Lord, I think I could remain your priest" only if the Lord were to give him proof positive of a very graphic hell that punishes the really bad guys—Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot—and their henchmen forever. In lieu of this, he goes so far as to suggest that converting to Judaism might be the most Christian way to make penance for the Holocaust and does so himself by the end of the book, declaring that "For me, now, Judaism is Christianity without Christ, and I have a glad heart."

This is, perhaps, a little glib. For me, anyway, Christ is about the only thing worthwhile about Christianity. The rest of it is mostly grand inquisitors, Puritan witch-burners, scheming Borgia popes, the Children’s Crusade, and crazed hermits in the desert, braying about your sex life. Making hell the lynchpin of Christianity is also problematic; to posit hell is to posit a God capable of endless, sadistic cruelty. And after all, isn’t hell where all the religious demonizing and dehumanizing came in, when it was time to separate out not only the mass murderers but the more marginal cases?

One of the best things about Doctorow, though, is that he doesn’t even accept even his own characters at face value. Hence Everett, sympathetic but secular, remains skeptical that some kind of new faith is possible or necessary, insisting only, "I like birds, I like women, I like language. These foolish things gladden the heart."

What his rabbis, Sarah Blumenthal and Joshua Gruen, want is a new faith. Sarah argues passionately near the end of the book for "a hallowed secularism, the idea of God…as Something Evolving as civilization has evolved—that God can be redefined, and recast, as the as the human race trains itself to a greater degree of metaphysical and scientific sophistication." She pleads for a "universalist ethics," to be founded upon "the American civil religion"—something that would mean "the expansion of ethical obligation democratically to be directed all three hundred and sixty degrees around, not just upon one’s co-religionists, a daily indiscriminate and matter-of-fact reverence of human rights unself-conscious as a handshake." This, to Sarah—and to Doctorow—seems to be what should now constitute "our quest for the sacred…Not just a new chapter but a new story…"

But is it really a new story? To walk into, say, most Protestant churches outside the South today, is to encounter faiths that have moved very close to this ideal, new doctrines that encourage tolerance and honor other religious traditions, and go very lightly on sin, condemnation, ritual—even Christ. (Old joke: When is the only time the name Jesus Christ is uttered in a Unitarian church? When the Catholic janitor falls off his ladder.)

Yet—these faiths are, by and large, struggling for adherents, while dogma, fire-and-brimstone, "family values," and angels pull ’em in by the bushelful, not only in Protestantism, but in Catholicism and Judaism as well. And even on the liberal side of things, what movement has ever dreamed bigger, what movement has ever come closer to realizing the tolerant, loving community wished for by Sarah than the civil rights movement led by the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—a specifically Christ-inspired, religious movement that had no trouble in attracting allies from Jewish, Catholic, and secular traditions and which remains probably the proudest story of human civilization in the past century?

The particular model Doctorow has in mind is—New York, New York. This is not surprising, for it has always been his favorite canvas; with the exception of his first book, the western Welcome to Hard Times (1960), his works have all been set largely in and around the city.

No one has ever written better about New York, and City of God is no exception, though here he has assigned it a bigger-than-life role. Doctorow seems to believe that his city will have to serve as the New Jerusalem. In other words, Augustine’s City of God is the City of Man, of bustling, polyglot, imperfect, spirited humanity, living more or less in peace and tolerance here in New York. Everett finds it "the most spectacular phenomenon in the unnatural world. There is a specie recognition we will never acknowledge. A primal over-soul."

There is something to this. New York, I have found, is the one spot in America where one is always intensely aware of place, of where one is. This is due mostly, I believe, to the way in which we are always pushed up against each other—in our tiny apartments, on streets that are crowded almost any hour of the day or night. In an America full of empty streets, of citizens hidden away behind tinted car windows and gated communities, New York is a gigantic anomaly, a place where one is daily forced into dozens of other interactions with all kinds of other people. These can be trivial or significant; exhausting or frightening or downright irritating—but also stimulating, consoling, and immensely satisfying.

Is all this really a model for anyone—"a primal over-soul"? Well, it may have to be. There are fewer, classical economic reasons than ever for cities to exist, at least in America. Smokestack industries all moved to Mexico, everything done by computer; even the stock market going on-line. Yet, in a world expected to reach ten or twelve billion people by 2100, people will simply have to live closer together, lest endless, sprawling suburbs eat up all our farmland, parks, natural resources, leave us stalled on the highway choking on our exhaust fumes.

In such an atomized, computer-screen world there will be, too, more spiritual reason than ever to deliberately bring people together, to some physically shared space. Or as Doctorow writes, "The city may begin from a marketplace, a trading post, the confluence of waters, but it secretly depends on the human need to walk among strangers."

To borrow a metaphor from Doctorow himself, his superb historical novels—The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks—have all been expanding outward, from our own, national Big Bang at the start of the American century. He has usually ended these books by pushing them decisively into our present universe. The cast of characters at the end of Ragtime morph into The Little Rascals, Billy Bathgate, we are told, will become a wealthy and powerful man; Joe Patterson, at the end of Loon Lake, turns into a resume.

Now, in City of God, Doctorow’s America—and New York—seem to have reached the end of their expansion. Is it to fall back in on itself?

"You do still get a sense of the precariousness of it all, of our own susceptibility. We are very careless of what we have. We constantly have to test it, test it, test it." frets Doctorow, who toward the end of City of God sketches a possible near-future when environmental disasters threaten the food and water supply, and flood the city with new waves of immigrants. Crime increases, budgets are busted, rioting and police crackdowns follow.

This may seem overblown, and even if it does come to pass it’s unlikely that Doctorow’s primal over-soul will provide the belief in something transcendent that human beings seem to crave. Yet what are the alternatives? Try turning on the set sometime and reading the future in the face of, say, Gary Bauer, one of the six grotesques currently parading through the Republican presidential debates—this small, porcine man, spewing the same old bigoted swill about how gay weddings will denigrate the institution of marriage, and the country has never been the same since they got rid of school prayer, and it’s God’s will that the rich get another whopping tax cut. Doctorow’s vision may be one rough beast, but it is very human by comparison.

© Copyright Talk Magazine 2001

 

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