City of god book summary doctorow biography

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.

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In his workbook, a New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain--sketches for stories, accounts of his love affairs.

E. L. Doctorow’s 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.

A New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain--sketches for stories, accounts of his love affairs, riffs on the meanings of popular songs.

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.