51 pages • 1 hour read
E. L. DoctorowCity of God
Fiction | Novel | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Everett
Everett is either the narrator or writer of the entire book, so it’s important to consider that, outside of Thomas, Sarah, Joshua, and a few other minor characters, every person in the novel springs from his imagination, including historical figures and other characters like Sarah’s father who we mostly see through the lens of Everett’s writing. At the beginning of the book, he is fascinated by Thomas’s religious doubts and the theft of the cross from his church, and the two grow close as Everett begins writing a detective novel about him. However, Everett’s early drafts are hardboiled and shallow, and he spends much of the novel looking for a way into the story, including telling a historical story about a Jewish ghetto, writing from the voice of several historical figures, and ruminating on the nature between pop culture, religion, and the history of the 20th century.
During all of this, he grows closer to Thomas and Sarah; interacting with them disrupts his various writing projects, and any time he gets feedback from one of them, his writing either abandons its current premise or changes course. He struggles with his own ability to reckon with the vastness of his subject matter, and Pem pushes against his secular disdain for religion. His various narratives become more intertwined as the book goes on; for example, the sections written from Wittgenstein’s point of view are echoing the Einstein sections, which are drawn from Everett’s own attempts to reconcile physics and God. In this way, the book can be said to be primarily about Everett’s struggle to make sense of his subject. He also grows to love Thomas and Sarah, and he is suspicious that his own intentions with Sarah are impure, as he has a history of being a bit of a womanizer.
By the end of the novel, he has been shaken in his faith that a straightforward narrative can contain his attempt to write about God (and often uses movies as a shorthand for shallow narratives that attempt to flatten theme), and he is only able to conclude that as the new millennium begins and society becomes overpopulated, leading to greater atrocity, that the right kind of story for this moment is one about people like Thomas and Sarah, though it seems as though he has given up on his attempts to write it, and he has moved closer to having a settled view of the meaning of God.
Thomas Pemberton
Thomas Pemberton is a man whose rationality and faith are in conflict. He has spent three decades as an Episcopal priest to a flagging congregation, and his faith has reached a crisis point, so much so that he is in trouble with the church for approaching heretical ideas. He is divorced from a woman who he married in part as a slap in the face to her father, who is a powerful figure from the Johnson administration. Thomas is seen as someone stuck in the radicalism of the sixties, and he agrees with that assessment but doesn’t see why it’s a problem. When his church’s cross is stolen and reappears on the rooftop of a synagogue run by Joshua Gruen and Sarah Blumenthal, he takes it as a sign, though he is as yet unsure what the sign means.
Thomas is very much a man looking for a quest, so when Joshua Gruen is brutally killed while searching for a Jewish ghetto archive that his father-in-law helped secret away during World War II, Thomas (who has begun to have feelings for Sarah), takes up the search, ultimately finding it in a KGB archive and returning it to Sarah’s possession. His experiences with this lead him closer to Sarah and also cause him to question his faith further. To him, a meaningful church would be one that looks evil in the face and reconciles it, and he doesn’t think the Christian church can do that in its current form. The combination of his growing love for Sarah, his trouble with the church (he has his congregation taken from him and is reassigned to a hospice), and his belief that God must be reimagined lead him to surrender his title and convert to Judaism.
By novel’s end, he marries Sarah and gives a speech to the effect that the God of the 20th century is a God that allowed great evil to happen, and without evidence that justice is served, He must be reimagined. He sees his conversion and marriage as intertwined proof that the sign of his cross has led him to the right path for his faith and his life.
Sarah Blumenthal
Sarah is a rabbi who, along with her husband, founds the Experimental Judaism synagogue; she says that she turned to Judaism in earnest because of her mother’s death and her father’s experience in the Holocaust. She is a serious, thoughtful woman and does everything in partnership with her husband, Joshua Gruen, until his tragic murder.
After his death, she mourns but continues to conduct services and grow the synagogue. She also grows closer to Thomas and Everett, and the two in some ways vie for her attention. Like Thomas, she is actively reinventing her faith by holding Judaic tradition up to the modern lens, incorporating a questioning irreverence to the religion that is meant to get back to what’s pure about faith. When Thomas completes her dead husband’s search for the ghetto archive, she is deeply moved, and they fall in love. Her religious beliefs seem to be largely settled even as she questions them, and she exudes strength and dignified beauty in the closing passages of the book.
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By E. L. Doctorow
