City of God

E. L. Doctorow’s 2000 novel City of God is a postmodern, metafictional novel of religious questioning that attempts to reconcile the history of the 20th century, particularly the Holocaust, with modern conceptions of morality and God. The novel is structured as a fragmented writer’s notebook written by a character loosely based on Doctorow himself. The plot, which concerns a stolen cross and an Episcopalian priest’s doubts about his faith, is rendered through the mediated lens of an author struggling to arrive at the subject matter of his next book.

Plot Summary

City of God’s fragmented sections come from the writer’s notebook of Everett, one of the main characters of the book and a loose representation of E. L. Doctorow. The book alternates between Everett’s fictional recreations of the events of the plot alongside conversations he has with two additional main characters, Thomas Pemberton and Sarah Blumenthal, and a few others figures.

The book begins with Everett writing about his friend Thomas Pemberton as though he is a spiritual detective. Pem is an Episcopal priest whose congregation is flagging and who is in trouble with church leadership over a crisis of faith. When the cross at his church is stolen, he takes it upon himself to find out what happened to it. All of this action is related through Everett’s fiction, culminating in the moment when the cross is found again on the rooftop of Sarah Blumenthal and Joshua Gruen, people who run a small radical synagogue practicing what they call Experimental Judaism. While writing about this, Everett begins an affair with a woman named Moira and fictionalizes their experience, spinning it into an overwrought melodrama of a controlling and obsessive man.

Pem and Joshua take it upon themselves to search for the meaning of the stolen cross. Joshua is concerned that it is an antisemitic gesture, but Pem disagrees, thinking that it may be the sign he has been looking for. The narrative is interrupted when Pem and Everett meet for drinks and Pem criticizes Everett’s draft; as a result, Everett largely abandons his detective story, leaving out the growing friendship between Pem, Joshua, and Sarah.

The novel turns to the fate of a ghetto archive that was hidden away at the end of World War II. At the time of Everett’s writing, Joshua has been murdered in Europe while searching for the archive, which he learned of from Sarah’s father who survived the Holocaust in the Kovno ghetto. Everett begins to write the story of Sarah’s father, Yehoshua. His parents are likely murdered by the Nazis when he is only ten, and he is given to the care of a tailor named Srebnitsky. When Srebnitsky humiliates a German officer, Schmitz, he is hanged in the public square, leaving Yehoshua in the care of the Jewish council. He begins working as a runner, delivering messages and eventually helping them secret their daily archive away with a sympathetic priest in the city. The fate of the archive is left unknown as the ghettos are broken up toward the end of the war, and Yehoshua and his people are packed into boxcars and taken out of the ghetto to their death.

This narrative is broken up by several other threads, including writing from the point of view of Einstein and Wittgenstein, two great minds engaged in the project of understanding the universe. When Everett shares his writing with Sarah, she echoes Pem’s remarks, saying that he got to the truth of it but did not fully capture the reality. She reveals that Pem, whose church has now been deconsecrated, has taken it upon himself to finish Joshua’s search for the archive. Everett realizes that his friend is in love with Sarah, who is still in mourning.

Everett’s writing turns toward an understanding of his own place in the history of the 20th century by relating stories of his father’s experience as a runner during World War I and then his brother’s experience as a bomber pilot in World War II. In each story, there is a moment of clarity amidst the terror of battle, and he connects the stories to each other and the present moment. He also begins writing about a fictional ex-reporter who is tracking down war criminals who haven’t been punished. His character kills a man resembling Schmitz, who is now living in Cincinnati, but it is an accident, so he feels justice has not been served.

Pem finds the archive and brings it back to the US; he and Sarah go over it together with government witnesses, and Pem decides that this is what a new church should aspire to be. There is enough evidence in the archive to reopen Schmitz’s case, but he dies in his sleep before this happens. Meanwhile, Everett writes several short narratives about the nature of evil and original sin.

The recovery of the archive brings Pem and Sarah closer than ever, and Pem decides he must leave the church. He begins to study under Sarah to convert to Judaism, and they decide to marry. In conversations with Everett, he relates his new idea of where God can be found: in understanding the patterns and lives of the city.

At the wedding reception, Pem gives a long prayer about the ugliness and evil of the world, saying that if God does not intend to show proof of Hell for people like Hitler, then God must be re-envisioned for the modern era. Everett ends his notebook with a harrowing scene of the 21st century that is headed toward sectarian violence and a rise of fascism before choosing to focus on a couple like Sarah and Pem who are engaged in a serious study of God.