City of God

The introduction of another movie plot—this time about a character resembling Everett whose life literally becomes a movie as he moves into a dreamlike world of film production—echoing the postmodern films of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman such as Being John Malkovich and Synecdoche, New York—creates another dizzying layer to the narrative: An author character based loosely on the author of the novel conceiving of a fictional version of himself that is concerned with how fiction and reality are merging is a nested, labyrinthine representation of the novel’s own struggle to reconcile fiction, God, culture, and the history of the century. Here, the novel begins to make an argument about film; when the character says “something is going on with movies in a way that even the people who make them don’t understand,” he is speaking for Everett’s trouble with an industry that wields its narrative power irresponsibly (which can be read biographically, as Doctorow himself has had several of his books made into films that were ultimately viewed as disappointments). There’s a knowing self-criticism here, as Everett is doing the same with his friends and Sarah’s father’s story that he sees film doing: taking the actuality of their lives and smoothing them into a working narrative.

The ghetto archive that emerges in Yehoshua’s story links the thematic and narrative threads together: it becomes Joshua and then Pem’s quest to retrieve it, and its contents represent the “everything that is the case” that separates the actuality of the Holocaust with the narrativized version of it that Everett creates. City of God is, as its characters claim, a detective story, and the ghetto archive is positioned as a postmodern MacGuffin (an object or artifact that is essential to the forward motion of the plot of a genre story but is ultimately meaningless itself). Sorting through its contents would be similar to the various narrative threads Everett is putting into his writing or Sarah’s attempts to reconceive of her synagogue’s position with tradition, and its retrieval becomes the underlying plot of the book despite happening mostly in the margins.

The main idea of the book Everett is writing comes into focus in the parallels between his fictions and the real story he’s following through Sarah and Pem, and it can be fairly argued that this is also the main idea of City of God: the quest to understand humanity and its relation to God is necessary but impossible to fulfill. It will always reach a point of abstraction or interpretation, and the truth contained in a religious text can be disproven by the fact of history. Everett’s writings are meant to unpack this idea, and the ways in which the characters of Sarah and Pem comment on and influence his writing show that although he claims he’s writing about Pem’s crisis of faith, he’s really struggling with one of his own. His drafts, often abortive or abandoned by the novel when the ideas in them are challenged by external events to Everett’s writing, represent his inability to contain the size of his ideas, as though he has become convinced that there’s no way to narrativize the events of the 20th century without undoing their importance and meaning.

The difficulty for a reader, then, is grappling with what the narrative intent of City of God might be if it is presenting its own task as impossible. At the root of metafiction is a desire to convey the importance of narrative, yet this book seems to be saying that narrative, whether film or literature, is not suited to the task of making meaning. In one sense, it undoes its own claim by presenting powerful representations of moments in history, such as Yehoshua’s story of Srebnitsky, but its fractured, discursive structure that skips over many of the most significant plot points (Joshua’s murder, for example, is dealt with largely after the fact and almost dismissively) in favor of one man’s struggle to make sense of what’s going on around him—and having that man, Everett, think that his goal is actually conveying his friend Pem’s quest when really he’s only capturing his own—points the reader deliberately to the ways in which City of God is intentionally failing to contain its own whole.