City of God

“You find invariably among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as entitlement.”

This quote serves both as Everett justifying his own affair with a married woman and as a larger critique of corporate life, which has become the dominant mode of success in American life.

“The lover, for his part, envisions a grand finale to his enterprise that is so dangerous, so extreme, that he decides his life, heretofore adrift in boredom and alienation and the absence of serious conviction, may now be redemptively reconceived as an art form.” 

Everett here is writing about his own affair in a way that is fictionalized, and so he is subtly condemning his own actions in showing that his own sense of alienation is leading to cruelty toward Moira. He is also making a larger argument for the way humans justify their actions by investing them with a sense of purpose and shape.

“This is my laboratory, here, in my skull.” 

This quote is related to Everett’s self-conception as a writer and also echoed in Everett’s monologue from the point of view of Einstein, drawing a comparison between the two kinds of creativity on display (writing fiction and advanced physics).

“The point is whatever I say will alarm them. Nothing shakier in a church than its doctrine. That’s why they guard it with their lives, isn’t it?” 

Thomas Pemberton is at odds with his church leadership because he has begun to publicly question the fundamental tenets of his faith. For Pem, rationalism and faith must be reconciled, and he believes that doctrinal law only provides a framework to ignore the inherent contradictions between the two.

“I asked them to imagine […] what mortification, what ritual, what practice might have been a commensurate Christian response to the disaster. Something to assure us our faith wasn’t some sort of self-deluding complacency. Something to assure us of the holy truth of our story. Something as earthshaking in its way as Auschwitz and Dachau. So what would that be?”

This is a central question of the book: what is humanity to do in the face of the Holocaust (and war in general), and how can the God that Thomas Pemberton believes in exist in that context? He views his church’s ambivalence toward the matter as untenable, which is what leads him to look for an alternative mode of belief.

“We must conclude that given the events in the 20th century of European civilization, the traditional religious concept of God cannot any longer be seriously maintained.” 

This is Everett writing as Einstein, drawing connections between himself, Pemberton, and great thinkers like Einstein and Wittgenstein, both of whom repeatedly echo the doubts and religious concerns that are addressed in other parts of the novel.

“And in the beginning? In the beginning—what? Who is talking, who is being addressed? Who was there? Where is the voucher? The people who made up these stories knew even less than we do. You want God? Don’t look at Scripture, look everywhere, at the planets, the constellations, the universe. Look at a bug, a flea. Look at the manifold wonders of creation, including the Nazis. That’s the kind of God you’re dealing with.” 

Srebnitsky, speaking here, has a bitter, settled view of God as awe-inducing but uncaring, the kind of God that would allow the Holocaust to happen. This serves as one possible conclusion to Thomas Pemberton’s search, and perhaps the one that most closely resembles Everett’s own thinking on the matter.

“He’d had it in his power with his scissors to stab the commandant. For a moment I thought he’d done just that, so great was his rage. I have since concluded that he must have understood the disaster that would befall the ghetto were he to kill the man. So you see, what he accomplished was specifically self-sacrificial, a modulated act of defiance as deft and precise as his tailoring.” 

Srebnitsky’s death has a profound effect on Yehoshua’s understanding of the world: he is willing to sacrifice himself for his dignity, but not at the cost of his peers, which speaks to his choice to die as a person who retained his own importance and humanity, unlike the countless number of Jewish people who are slaughtered by Nazis without thought.

“I was moved to have philosophical thoughts. Why was the scale of numbers on the Nazi radio recognizable to me, a Jewish boy? Because numbers were immutable. Their order was fixed, universally true. Even Nazis had to comply with them. Well, if numbers were the same for everyone everywhere in the universe, didn’t that mean they had to have been installed in our brains by God? And if so, why—except to teach everyone the nature of truth.”

The connection between physics and God is a common through line among the various narrative threads in the novel, and here, Yehoshua is seeing the roughly the same thing that Srebnitsky told him in quote 8 without the same bitterness and rage. Instead, it’s an affirmation of the universe as a purposeful creation.

“War was the emergent property of human thought, / As stolidity is the emergent property of molecules of oak.” 

There is a grim, repeated view throughout the book that is reiterated by the generational depictions of World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam war: humankind will always trend toward destruction, and it is only going to get worse in the 21st century. The soldiers that Everett depicts in his writing all hold their place in history as unavoidable and the terminus of society.

“But listen for a moment. All history has contrived / to pour this beer you’re drinking into your glass, / it has brought the sad, jeaned lady at the bar’s end / her Marlboros, / given the mirror behind those bottles its / particular tarnish / and, not incidentally, lit us in this neon-blue light / of illusory freedom.” 

The purpose of the “Author’s Bio” sections of the book are overtly to connect Everett himself, and therefore the present generation, to the brutal experiences of his male family members who served in war. Here, Everett is bringing in an imagined audience to show how their very existence is tied to history, and that history is driven by the belief that Americans (or even humans generally) have free will.

“I could not see them now. They might have been there with me, but they were of the past. Even had I been able to turn and look behind me, what of them would I have recognized at this time of their degradation, when like myself they had been sundered from their names, when their beings were undone, when whatever they had been was in process of industrial transfiguration, when all together we were no more than a suspension of disjunctive torments of the living dying and stiffened dead of that boxcar?” 

The closing passage of Yehoshua’s ghetto narrative brings home the ultimate dehumanization that Jewish people experienced during the Holocaust and how even for those that survived the brutalization, the trauma of their abasement was complete. Genocide is about the total annihilation of a people, and in the boxcar, Yehoshua realizes that the Nazi goal has been accomplished; their own identities have been stripped from them.

“’It may be inaccurate, but it’s quite true. I don’t know how, but you caught my father’s voice.’” 

The nature of truth and its relation to actuality is a common theme of the book, whether it is in considering religious texts in relation to history or Everett’s writing and its relationship to his friends’ lived experiences. Here, Sarah advocates that truth is more important than accuracy, but, given that the novel abandons Everett’s attempts to write about Yehoshua going forward, it’s fair to assume that her words are unsatisfying.

“I love movies. They make themselves out of the actual materials of the world, you see […] leaving the substance of the world unchanged but rendered in exact homologous equivalence of itself. With movies you sit in darkness and learn that the world is everything that is the case.” 

Wittgenstein speaks through Everett’s writing here, comparing how movies are made with one of his most famous phrases. Everett himself has a much more complicated relationship with movies, seeing them as an illiterate medium that cannot move beyond their limitations.

“’It’s not impossible that Pem has internalized them—his natural father, John, of the historic church, and the maverick adopted father, Jim Pike—and set them against each other. There is your story, there is the conflict if you’re looking for one.’” 

This statement by Pem’s bishop is an accurate enough portrayal of Thomas Pemberton’s problem with the church and its origins, but it misses the nuance that Pem himself would advocate for and is dismissive of his position as one left over from the radical thought of the sixties. The bishop sees the problem as, essentially, one of disposition and rebellion, whereas Pem sees his disillusionment as part of a reckoning with a broken institution.

“Friends, brothers and sisters / How can we see to it that our stories / don’t falter like old veterans parading? / The experience of experience is untransmittable, / The children shrug what’s done is done, / and history instructs them finally / not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time […]” 

Throughout the novel, there are attempts to assert the significance of small, personal stories of tragedy in wartime, which this narrator sees as a futile effort; the true gravity of the situation cannot be conveyed, and so the horrors of war are doomed to lose their impact and be repeated.

“’My husband, Rabbi Gruen, said to me once, “Reconstruction is only a start.” He means that by its means it we can presume to examine every element of the tradition without bias and decide what to dispense with and what to keep.’”

Sarah, speaking here to her congregants, lays out the problem that the novel is grappling with and may point to its ultimate thesis: putting all of the pieces on the board, whether it is of a religious doctrine, a historical ghetto archive, or a fractured writer’s notebook, is only the beginning of the work that must be done to understand the biggest problems of life.

“The uncanny feeling comes over him, like the dizzying blood drift of an illness, that this bare unadorned room of industrial windows and terrible harsh light is what a new church must aspire to […]” 

The moment when Pem and Sarah look over the archive for the first time is the point at which Pem begins to understand that he must leave the Christian faith. He is faced with the raw data of daily suffering, and he does not have an adequate answer for it.

“I can try and tell you how we lived over there / but if I speak of it in words and sentences / I will be lying. / I should speak in tongues / So that it will be God recounting what I have done / and have had done to me.” 

The Vietnam War led to an intense disillusionment in American thinking, and the narrator of this section is speaking to the inability to convey what led to that. Tellingly, his depiction of his experience veers the most into cliché and exploitative narrative, confirming his own statement. This section of the book is in conversation with many of the tropes of Vietnam stories while showing that they are insufficient as stories.

“How did I get onto this? Why am I thinking of this? Maybe—and I am after the fact by some seventy years—maybe I believed what went on in a theater should be different from the street.” 

This is a line spoken by Everett’s version of Frank Sinatra, who eventually rues his own position as a pop culture icon who was making what he views as insignificant art in the face of the devastation of the 20th century. His argument is that he believes that entertainment should be differentiated from the real world, which he comes to reject, ending up with a belief that is more in line with the novel’s own argument that entertainment already embodies the real world.

“Now McIlvane’s motioning for me to sing: ‘Follow the bouncing ball,’ he says, and because this is the man I have chosen to hear my confession, I do, adding my baritone to the soprano and the growl, one golden oldie after another, and feeling the same love for You, tears welling hot in my throat, as when in the pulpit, with my congregation, I belted out, A mighty fortress is our God […]”

Here, several threads draw together, including the image of the ‘bouncing ball’ from the nuclear accident that killed [____] and the treatment of pop songs as objects of religious significance. In Everett’s new version of his friend Pem, all the threads that have been separate throughout the novel are becoming connected, mirroring Everett’s own belief that there’ something important to be understood in Pem and Sarah’s conception of God.

“’[…] all this is the group voice trying to enunciate over time what it means to be a civilized human being . . . but the key to all this is “over time.” So, here’s my question: Has time stopped?’”(

This is Sarah speaking to her congregation and making an argument that they live in the same context of history that their ancestors did; therefore, they should take the same approach by debating, scrutinizing, and questioning the elements of their doctrinal faith to arrive at the meaning that makes the most sense for their current lives.

“[…] if there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it’ll be coming down the avenue in traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else. It will be cryptic, discerned over time, piecemeal, to be communally understood at the end like a law of science.” 

Here, Pemberton has arrived at his conclusion about the meaning of his stolen cross and its reappearance: in order to understand God in a postmodern, fractured landscape, you must learn to connect the materials to each other and read between the lines of everyday life. He is arguing against an authoritarian view of God, which he sees as the God of Christianity, in favor of a decentralized, ever-evolving conception that comes from intellectual scrutiny.