City of God - Softcover

Doctorow, E L

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812985893 ISBN 13: 9780812985894

Publisher: Random House Group, 2014

Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

With brilliant and audacious strokes, E. L. Doctorow creates a breathtaking collage of memories, events, visions, and provocative thought, all centered on an idea of the modern reality of God. At the heart of this stylistically daring tour de force is a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a rundown Episcopal church in lower Manhattan only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue. Intrigued by the mystery--and by the maverick rector and the young rabbi investigating the strange act of desecration--is a well-known novelist, whose capacious brain is a virtual repository for the ideas and disasters of the age.

Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, filled with the sights and sounds of New York, and encompassing a large cast of vividly drawn characters including theologians, scientists, Holocaust survivors, and war veterans, City of God is a monumental work of spiritual reflection, philosophy, and history by America's preeminent novelist and chronicler of our time.

Praise for City of God

"A grander perspective on the universe . . . a novel that sets its sights on God."--The Wall Street Journal

"Dazzling . . . The true miracle of City of God is the way its disparate parts fuse into a consistently enthralling and suspenseful whole."--Time

"Blooms with humor, and a humanity that carries triumphant as intelligent a novel as one might hope to find these days."--Los Angeles Times

"Radiates [with] panoramic ambition and spiritual incandescence."--Chicago Tribune

"One of the greatest American novels of the past fifty years . . . Reading City of God restores one's faith in literature."--The Houston Chronicle

About this title

Review:

E.L. Doctorow's City of God starts off not merely with a bang but with the big bang itself, that "great expansive flowering, a silent flash into being in a second or two of the entire outrushing universe". It doesn't remain on this cosmic plane throughout. There's a mystery here, along with a romance, a chilling Holocaust narrative and a deep-focus portrait of fin-de-siécle Manhattan.

In the early pages of the novel, an enormous brass cross is pilfered from a church on the Lower East Side. Father Thomas Pemberton of St Timothy's promptly sets off in search of it, dubbing himself the Divinity Detective. Yet he suspects from the start that this is no ordinary theft, with no ordinary solution. The cross eventually turns up on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism, a tiny Manhattan institution to which Pemberton has clearly been led by fate. His encounter with the synagogue's rabbinical duo--a husband-and-wife team struggling to reclaim a pre-scriptural state of "unmediated awe"--transforms his life. It also destroys what's left of his conventional Christian belief. As his relationship with Judaism deepens, he discards the clerical collar altogether and embarks upon a penitential exploration of the Holocaust--which in turn allows Doctorow to loop his narrative back and forth between several generations of (mostly) Jew and Gentile.

City of God is a marvellous hybrid which includes a metafictional framework (i.e., an author-as-character with a rather Doctorovian CV), an ongoing rumination on city life and a dozen other major strands and minor players. There is an undeniable power to the way Doctorow makes his fictional worlds collide, setting off all manner of historical and philosophical conflagrations. At one point he imagines "the totality of intimate human narrations/composing a hymn to enlightenment/if that were possible". A tall order, yes. But despite its occasional longueurs, City of God suggests that it is possible indeed. --James Marcus

Review:

"A grander perspective on the universe . . . a novel that sets its sights on God."--The Wall Street Journal

"Dazzling . . . The true miracle of City of God is the way its disparate parts fuse into a consistently enthralling and suspenseful whole."--Time

"Blooms with humor, and a humanity that carries triumphant as intelligent a novel as one might hope to find these days."--Los Angeles Times

"Radiates [with] panoramic ambition and spiritual incandescence."--Chicago Tribune

"One of the greatest American novels of the past fifty years . . . Reading City of God restores one's faith in literature."--The Houston Chronicle

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Group
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0812985893
• ISBN 13: 9780812985894
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288