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.
Pages 235-272Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 235-246 Summary
After a brief interlude of Everett and Pem packing up his books where Pem notes that most philosophers ended up affirming their own upbringing, the narrative shifts to a scene at a ceremony honoring a director. When three writers get up and start speaking his virtues, Everett views it as “the denigration of the literary” (236). He goes on to describe the history of movies as commerce: they began as something that was cheap to make and shown cheaply in storefronts before becoming bigger and bigger business. In the process, stories of regular people were drowned out, and idealized versions of the world were made instead, where people got along and justice was served. In this way, movies were transformed into something that people had to aspire to instead of representations of their own lives.
Everett begins dating a new woman, Miss Warren, and he meets Pem, Sarah, and Sarah’s boys in the park with her. Miss Warren is a freelance journalist and a natural storyteller who relays horrible things she’s witnessed and experienced with a glib dismissal. Sarah is unimpressed with Miss Warren, and Everett sees that she’s beginning to realize that he has a life outside of his relationship to Pem.
The boys discover an ant colony in the park and watch it, and Everett explains their society and communication system to the boys. Then he starts to think about how many New Yorkers were enjoying a sunny day and thinks that perhaps there’s not much difference in the way human society is organized by impulse. He thinks that perhaps humans, in the way their mind can be subsumed by an idea, are no less susceptible to what he calls “quantum weirdness,” calling back to both Einstein and Wittgenstein’s sections of the novel.
Everett writes from Pem’s point of view again, this time imagining him returning to the hospice center to see McIlvane, a man dying of lung cancer. He’s a layperson now, having given up the priesthood. He finds McIlvane in the company of a nun; the two of them are singing hymns together, which turn out to be old jazz standards. Pem looks around and sees the dying patients all enjoying the music in their own way, and he joins in on the singing.
Pages 246-257 Summary
Everett gives some background on the EJ synagogue, which is a small gathering dedicated to interrogating Jewish custom and faith via modern scholarship, leaving only what is essential. Pem is involved now, and is converting to Judaism, in part, he admits, because he and Sarah are to be married. Pem doesn’t like Everett questioning this; to him, his love of Sarah and his conversion are intertwined in a way that doesn’t need to be picked apart. Notably, Everett doesn’t have a tape recorder at this meeting, and when Pem asks where it is, Everett says he “gave it up,” implying that he’s done writing about his friend (248).
The EJ congregation grows, such that there’s a tendency to return to the same subjects. Sarah speaks to the newcomers’ questions, saying that as time has progressed, so too should the Jewish faith. Some question the abandonment of tradition, and the conversation buts up against the same problem Pem has had with his faith: the moment when rationalism and faith are at odds.
A man rises, challenging tradition as ancestor worship and proof that many would see faith as a dead thing. He says that the ancient Jewish faith was conceived in the context of Israel with little understanding for the cosmos, and he intimates that as humankind’s understanding has widened, so too should their concept of God.
After services, Everett confesses to Pem that the man was Murray Seligman, who went to the Bronx High School of Science with him and who is now a Nobel prize-winning physicist. Everett is annoyed at Pem’s interest in the man, who Everett hated at school, and Pem finds this all very amusing as part of the work of God bringing all these pieces together. He finds it particularly funny that Everett presumed he could write a book that captured it.
Sarah is invited to Washington to give an address. In it, she addresses the moral reality coming: ten billion people on the planet living in megacities fighting for resources. She sees the coming atrocities as amplified and horrific, so much so as to make the 20th century seem like a paradise.
Pages 257-272 Summary
Everett doesn’t anticipate being invited to Pem and Sarah’s wedding; rather, he expects it will be a civil ceremony, with perhaps Seligman as the witness. They are not going to wait for Pem to complete his conversion, and Pem admits to Everett that he has never felt more Christian than when he’s been studying to convert. When Everett tries to steer Pem away from this idea, he is chided for his secular disdain as Pem explains the anthropic principle: that whatever made the universe also made humanity possible. To a physicist like Seligman (who Pem has been talking to), that allows for the presence of God.
Everett isn’t invited to the wedding—Joshua’s sister is the witness at a civil ceremony—but he does attend a reception. Everett lingers on the outskirts, watching the friends and relatives and parsing out the two halves of the reception, who don’t do much mingling. Everett is confronted by the hostess, who needles him for being old and still single; to get away from her, he goes to talk to Pem’s old bishop, who says he has been surprised by Pem for thirty years.
Pem waves Everett over and introduces him to his grown daughters. He then says that Schmitz—the real one—died in his sleep two months ago, just as they found the evidence to convict him. He leaves Everett alone again, and, watching the partygoers, Everett grows dispirited, resenting the full lives Sarah and Pem have. He decides to leave soon, but Sarah finds him and asks him to dance. He feels his love for her and is worried he might say something foolish before her son cuts in.
At one point, Pem stands to give a speech. People are wary, but Sarah watches him, fascinated. He says that with his conversion, he is tapping into a different tradition and even a different set of numbers, but it is the turn of the millennium, and he reflects that he and Sarah would not have come together except as the result of incalculable death: her husband, in particular, but also her father’s childhood in the Holocaust and all of the death of hope that it brought.
He begins to pray to God, saying that everyone in the room has dealt with the evil of humankind, and that evil has put God into disrepute. He says there is a rising suspicion that God is the problem, and that in the face of all the genocide and evil in the world there is no hope to explain God or ourselves. He gives a long, detailed description of the kind of hell that would have to be proven true in order for him to remain God’s priest. Without that, Pem asserts that God must be remade: “We have only our love for each other for our footing […] Not enough. It’s not enough. We need a place to stand” (268).
The novel closes with a description of a city as a communal creation (without much need for God) that grows to the point of being untenable. In a rising tide of crime and loss of identity, religion is turned to a call to purge, and suddenly God is alive again. The city dissolves into armed neighborhoods and military control, which morphs into a commonplace belief that totalitarian control is the only way forward. Everett closes by saying that the hero and heroine of this story are a couple running a small synagogue on the Upper West Side.
Pages 235-272 Analysis
The end of the novel sees Everett back where he started, which is to say, reconciling the notion of the infinite with the meaning of life. This time, however, several new elements have interfered with his thinking, notably the introduction of Seligman, who is a figure of jealousy for Everett because of how he is able to reconcile his faith and science (and therefore become a person of interest to Pem). In some ways, Pem sees Seligman’s introduction in the church as the proof of his new system of belief rooted in paying attention to the textural details of city life: the questions Everett and Pem have been ruminating over are answered by the world around them.
Everett is displeased by all this because he feels left out of the answers that make Pem happy, which extends to Pem’s marriage to Sarah. He sees that Pem is moving into a period of his life in which his narrative is settled, which means Everett and Pem’s relationship will be less important; Everett even says he’s given up taking notes about Pem, indicating that he may have given up the notion of the book entirely. While Pem’s crisis of faith is drawing to a close, Everett’s has only grown. His final bit of writing about Everett as a detective sees him going to the cancer hospice post-defrocking and finding his ward singing jazz standards with a nun. Many different ideas and images are woven together here, including the midrash of pop songs, Louis Slotin’s experiment, and religious faith, indicating the way all these pieces are inextricably connected in Everett and his characters’ minds. For Everett, nothing has been solved.
Though he is calm in his conversations with Everett, Pem’s polemical prayer against God at his wedding indicates that there’s something simmering in his religious belief, and it serves as an encapsulation of the central theme of the book: a century of vicious war and genocide, in which justice was ill-served or not served at all (as in the case of Colonel Schmitz, who dies before he can be brough to trial), has done irreparable damage to the idea of God, and it must be reinvented. If the nontraditional structure of this novel can be said to have a climax, it’s this speech, which is the moment when the main character is allowed to speak at length for himself instead of through the mediations and interpretations of Everett.
The final act of the novel shrinks the narrative back down to figures based on Pem and Sarah in the face of a coming century that will further test the reputation of God through sectarian violence and totalitarianism. This can be read either as Everett understanding the scope at which his story should unfold—and its depiction as a movie script indicates that he perhaps is finding a way to reclaim film from the ugly, corporatized and idealized version of it that he’s argued against in his writing—or it can be read as what it is: the conclusion of City of God, a novel written as a series of narratives and vignettes by a frustrated famous novelist grappling with how to tackle the idea of God. The first reading suggests that there’s still a place for traditional narrative as a means of interpreting the modern world, and the second suggests that meaning is only found in looking carefully at the pieces. As is often the case in postmodern literature, the question is left unsettled.
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By E. L. Doctorow
