City of God

A Novel

By: E. L. Doctorow

Narrated by: John Rubinstein

New York Times best-seller.

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)

©2001 E. L. Doctorow (P)2014 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"E.L. Doctorow is an astonishing novelist - astonishing not only in the virtuosity with which he deploys his mimetic skills, but also in the fact that it is impossible to predict even roughly the shape, scope and tone of one of his novels from its predecessors." (Robert Tower, The New York Times Book Review)

"Doctorow is a master of atmosphere.... He knows the art of storytelling inside and out." ( Newsweek)

Deep and enormous sweep of ideas

This is a challenging book to review. It is unlike almost any I have read--and difficult to classify, though quite satisfying to listen to (after I began to grasp it's process, or non-process).

There is a rather light plot going on--a writer is committing ideas to notebooks--therefore, as we hear them, they lack the continuity of a novel--but seem to be the range of things that capture his attention, the scope of which are enormous. Then there is a story about a Christian church losing it's cross, and having it cruelly show up on the roof of a Jewish synagogue. This gives the sense that the entire book is meant to arouse notions of vexing theological questions, and Doctorow does not disappoint as he brings it to even cosmological questions.

It begins--in parallel with the Bible, with an explanation of one current belief about beginning of the universe, an expanded story about the Big Bang, and thereafter shifts among various ideas, verses, stories, that the writer would like to explore. The priest and the rabbis do some of the story telling, but as the book is not intended to simply be a novel with a linear plot, it is not always clear "who" is speaking--the writer, the other people or possibly the author himself. (It might be different if reading it--since there are sometimes breaks that make those things more clear).

However, not always being certain of whose consciousness is being expressed does not take away from the more important aspects, which seem to be a collection and expression of ideas and events (especially the Holocaust) that permeate the thinking around the latter part of the 20th century and the turn of the century (and still, for that matter). I believe it was originally published in 2000, so I'd say is quite appropriate in it's symbolic timing.

It is dazzling to listen to--I know I could listen many times and always find new things to hear and contemplate. This book defies an easy definition--as at one moment we are hearing about Einstein's ability to hold deeply religious and also scientific ideas in his mind simultaneously--while having a character (the priest) who seems unable to manage the religious ideas that he promotes to his congregation, so many doubts does he have.

I have not done justice to this book in my review--there are so many different aspects that one could comment upon. I will just say that it is fascinating--and though it is necessary to suspend the need for a book to have the typical movement from one point to another, it is quite something to sit back and listen to some of the ideas that are defining our time--in some contrast (implied if not stated) to those which shaped the thinking of others in history. It is a book that relies less on character development and mostly on the exposition of consciousness as it explores the broad and the miniscule in the universe from a theological, philosophical, even poetic point of view. I will have to say it has left an impact on me--and I know that I will listen again.

A wonderful, challenging novel by one our greatest authors

In the past (before I retired from my job as an English Professor, I’ve named E. L. Doctorow as one of the United States’ greatest gifts to world literature for several reasons: his deep understanding of the society that he writes about in each of his books; his willingness to delve into philosophy and the human mind; his sometimes jarring plot structure and his ability to knit those seemingly disparate parts into a grand whole; his unbelievable ability to skip into genre fiction (gangster stories and mysteries, for example) and, of course, his dazzling prose.

But even as he does create a meaningful “whole” by the end of the last chapter, perhaps the quality that I most admire is that his books do not “end,” Rather they open out into the lived world of the reader, echoing and enlarging perception of the truthfulness of the book’s themes (or ideas). His books keep returning for a while, reinstating themselves in the reader’s thoughts.

This is a serious book that asks profound questions about modern (2000) religion, science, greed, and inhumanity. But it’s also about memory, friendship, and love.

Stick with Doctorow and you’ll be rewarded.

Where is the story?

I listened to two hours of this book and there is no story. It seems just a collection of random sentences. It's disappointing because I have read and enjoyed all of the author's previous books. This one made no sense. It begins with a chapter about the beginnings of the universe, then goes on to a chapter about what I guess is the main theme and characters and then diverges from there. The author is a great writer but seems to be wandering all over the literary landscape. I very rarely do this, but I am returning the book to get a credit back.

Shallow ramblings of a self centered man

jumble of perspectives from someone of questionable character. stop and deleted after 5 minutes of listening.