City of God

The novel begins with Everett puzzling over the concept of infinity and wondering how astronomers grapple with the concept before transitioning to a scene of him meeting a woman, Moira, at a dinner party. The two agree to meet at a museum to look at the Monets, which Everett is clear will blossom into an affair. The narrative returns to the contemplation of the universe and how many billions of years passed before the first being was born with free will.

Everett receives an email from Tom Pemberton, an Episcopalian priest that Everett wants to write about, answering questions about his life and a cross that was stolen from his church. The next section, titled “Heist,” begins Everett’s drafts of a detective story from Tom’s point of view, which will recur several times throughout the opening third of the book. In it, Tom walks around the waterfront, finding street vendors who are selling items stolen from his church while ruminating on New York and his own faith in a grizzled, hard-boiled style.

Everett meets up with Moira and they plan to begin an affair. As she leaves, he has a complex series of emotions, most notably regret. He then wanders around New York, picking out locations and details for his detective story. In the East Village, Tom’s neighborhood, Everett sees the people getting by as best they can, and he has a long rumination on New York as a miraculous confluence of history, modernity, and community.

The next segment of the novel returns to rumination on the Big Bang and the people who study it. Everett thinks that a mad, prehistoric priest may have had a better understanding of the sanctity of the universe. He returns to writing his heist story, which sees Tom visiting with his congregants: first a terminal patient that wants nothing to with them, then a widow who questions religious doctrine, cries, and kisses Tom.

The fictional Tom takes details from his meetings and tries to incorporate them into a sermon. He then meets with Charley, an unspecified higher-up of the Episcopal church who is worried about the content of Tom’s sermons, which he finds too filled with questioning and doubt. There is a brief pause in the heist story as Moira and Everett consummate their affair. The heist story resumes: Tom finds more stolen items for sale, and he asks his drug dealer friend about it; the dealer gives him some marijuana and says that no one from the neighborhood is robbing him.

The fictional Tom sets up in the balcony of his church overnight to catch the thief, but he falls asleep. He wakes to hear someone fleeing the church, and after an unsuccessful chase he sees that the eight-foot cross behind the altar has been stolen. Tom talks to the New York Times about the theft, which he regrets; his thinking is that whoever stole the cross needed it, and this idea bears religious significance for him.

The novel returns to Everett’s contemplation of the universe as he thinks about the discovery of a neutrino’s mass. It then introduces a new thread that will recur several times in the book: “The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards” (21). Here, the narrator unpacks the lyrics “Me and My Shadow,” a 1927 jazz standard. The text looks at the lyrics line by line in the style of Talmudic exegesis. The interpretation discusses being separated from God, and the shadow in the song is an indication of His light. Everett then returns to thinking about physics, recalling that Einstein was very comfortable with the idea of God and thought of his work as aligned with religious pursuit.

In the heist story, the fictional Tom goes to see his rich ex-wife, Trish, and their two adult children, but the narrative is interrupted by what appears to be Everett’s complaints that his battery is dying and he’s exhausted. Everett then spends an afternoon in bed with Moira, who tells him about her husband, a powerful CEO who is beset by fears that everything will be taken from him, including Moira. The next segment returns to the idea of jazz standards, concluding that their memetic power can be a kind of self-discovery: “[…] pay attention to the tune you’re humming. Is it ‘Just One of those Things’? You will soon end the affair” (28).

In the heist story, Tom gets a voicemail from a rabbi Joshua Gruen saying they should meet. Gruen is a practitioner of Evolutionary Judaism, a small, radical sect of his own design, and Tom meets him at his home, which serves as the synagogue. There he is introduced to rabbi Sarah Blumenthal, Joshua’s wife, and their two young boys. Joshua leads Tom to the roof and shows him that the stolen cross has been left there. Joshua believes it to be a threat because of an anonymous phone call. Joshua and Tom talk, and they agree that they should work together to solve the mystery. When Tom returns home, he regrets not having someone like Sarah to share his faith with.

Meanwhile, Moira is becoming a story, too. Everett starts considering the affair in the third person and spinning it into a high-drama narrative, a movie. The main character grows bored with the affair and begins to control every detail of the woman’s life, dictating how she should dress and act around her husband. Everett invents a CIA backstory for the main character and decides he must be played by a movie star, and he pushes the story further into dramatic intrigue. The main character intends to push his cruelty and control to the limit, so that it can be “redemptively reconceived as an art form” (35).

The novel transitions into monologue by Albert Einstein. In it, he insists that he has made mostly simple observations, and that in doing so he has determined that nothing is constant other than the speed of light; whatever theological terror this inspires, he does not want responsibility. Two brief segments follow. One states that although there aren’t many songs about science, songs do seem to convey universal truth. In another, Everett goes bird watching and sees a great blue heron sharing a dock with an egret. Everett empathizes with the heron, which he thinks is lonely.

In the heist story, Joshua calls Tom and they run down what they know. Joshua thinks that the cross may have been a threat, as his new sect of Judaism is seen by some as apostasy. Later, Tom contemplates what he’s going to say to the bishop’s examiners who are going to question him about his faith. He runs down what he will say in an internal dialogue with God. He wants to say something that will truly qualify as heresy, and he wants to continue to pursue the mystery of God, even if it is outside his role in the church.

The novel returns to Einstein’s monologue as he recalls his upbringing in Ulm, where he first realized that he was situated in a long historical context. During his youth, he loved learning the violin, but his time at school was hard, particularly because he saw that the systems of authority around him were despotic and cruel toward his curiosity.